the United States. When better comprehended, Englishmen will accept it
without either resentment or regret. The United States has a larger
population than Great Britain: so much the better for the United
States. Also a larger proportion of that population must be admitted
into the category of gentleman-amateur in sport; so much the more the
better for them.

But, curiously enough, this condition has its inherent drawback, which
not impossibly more than compensates for its advantages. The fact that
young Americans grow up so much of a class involves the essential fact
that the enormous majority of them are educated at the Public Schools,
that is at the Board Schools or Government Schools or whatever they
would be called if their precise counterpart existed in England. The
United States has not (the fact has been touched on before) any group of
institutions comparable to the great schools of England. A few excellent
schools there are which bear some resemblance to the English models, but
they are not numerous enough to go any way towards leavening the nation.
It is to the Public Schools that, in the mass, the English
gentleman-amateur owes his training, not only in sports but in many
other things besides: especially in those things which stamp on him the
mark by which he is recognised as belonging to his right class through
life. The American, as has been said, is not so stamped; but in missing
that stamp--or in failing to receive it--he necessarily missed also all
that discipline and training in games which the Public School gave to
the Englishman. The very same cause as gives America an advantage in the
numbers from which she can draw her amateur athletes, also forbids that
these recruits should have had the same advantages of early training as
fall to the Englishman.

The thing is about as broad as it is long. It is not difficult to
imagine that the great schools might never have come into existence in
England, so that a larger proportion of the population than is now the
case would be educated at some intermediate institutions, at the Grammar
Schools let us say, when the English gentleman-amateur athletes--the
polo, golf, and tennis teams and the crews that row at Henley--would be
drawn from a larger circle of the population, and the individuals would
not bear as close a superficial resemblance, one to the other, as they
do to-day. They would in fact be more like the members of American
athletic teams as Englishmen