he boxing glove spares nothing but the public conscience, and that
as much ferocity, bloodshed, pain, and risk of serious injury or death
can be enjoyed at a glove fight as at an old-fashioned prizefight,
whilst the strain on the combatants is much greater. It is true that
these horrors are greatly exaggerated by the popular imagination, and
that if boxing were really as dangerous as bicycling, a good many of its
heroes would give it up from simple fright; but this only means that
there is a maximum of damage to the spectator by demoralization,
combined with the minimum of deterrent risk to the poor scrapper in the
ring.

Poor scrapper, though, is hardly the word for a modern fashionable
American pugilist. To him the exploits of Cashel Byron will seem
ludicrously obscure and low-lived. The contests in which he engages are
like Handel Festivals: they take place in huge halls before enormous
audiences, with cinematographs hard at work recording the scene for
reproduction in London and elsewhere. The combatants divide thousands of
dollars of gate-money between them: indeed, if an impecunious English
curate were to go to America and challenge the premier pugilist, the
spectacle of a match between the Church and the Ring would attract a
colossal crowd; and the loser's share of the gate would be a fortune to
a curate--assuming that the curate would be the loser, which is by no
means a foregone conclusion. At all events, it would be well worth a
bruise or two. So my story of the Agricultural Hall, where William
Paradise sparred for half a guinea, and Cashel Byron stood out for ten
guineas, is no doubt read by the profession in America with amused
contempt. In 1882 it was, like most of my conceptions, a daring
anticipation of coming social developments, though to-day it seems as
far out of date as Slender pulling Sackerson's chain.

Of these latter-day commercial developments of glove fighting I know
nothing beyond what I gather from the newspapers. The banging matches of
the eighties, in which not one competitor in twenty either exhibited
artistic skill, or, in his efforts to knock out his adversary, succeeded
in anything but tiring and disappointing himself, were for the most part
tedious beyond human endurance. When, after wading through Boxiana and
the files of Bell's Life at the British Museum, I had written Cashel
Byron's Profession, I found I had exhausted the comedy of the subject;
and as a game of patience or solitair