[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR." _I
Sin; In your correspondent's letter, " Co-education in America," in the Spectator of May 16th, he writes : " Surely, Sir, the records both of business and sport in the two countries " —referring to England and America—" are an easy refutation of such an assertion." So far as sport is concerned It is not only not a refutation, but a most damaging illustration for your correspondent's side of the case. Our athletes whom your men meet in competition are all without exception educated, not in our public schools—schools, as you very properly state in your own article on the same subject in your issue of the same date, " provided free by the State," and in which women teachers largely predominate—but in our private schools, such as St. Paul's, Groton, St. Mark's, and others, conducted on the same lines as your public schools, where the masters are all men, and in our Colleges, where, again, the professors are men. On the other hand, our pro- fessional baseball players, probably the trickiest lot of game- players in the world, I am ashamed to say, are, if they have had any schooling at all, drawn from our women-taught public schools. To one who has been a participant in and an observer of American sports and games for twentyfive years and more, the contrast between our professional baseball and our amateur game playing is so marked, so far as the influence upon character and manliness is concerned, that no further illustration of the point is necessary. The stroke of our Harvard crew which came over to row Cambridge two years ago was at your Harrow before going to Harvard, and at least three of the men behind him in the boat were graduates of Groton. Young Gould, the amateur tennis champion, had a severe training under the sportsmanlike superintendence of his father, who deserves almost as much credit as the boy for his successes. Indeed, all our repre- sentative sportsmen and athletes are drawn, not from our State-supported schools with their women teachers, but from our schools and Colleges directed and disciplined by men. If I were an Englishman, I should certainly maintain that an Empire governing one in every five inhabitants, and controlling one in every five square miles of the habitable globe, is an argument for men-trained men from your public schools and Universities very difficult of refutation. Permit me to endorse your own statement: " The fact that a boy may be flogged in the public schools of England is, in our opinion, one of the
most valuable privileges the well-to-do classes have retained for themselves." Well said, Sir ! When your boys and our boys become too precious and too dainty to be disciplined and punished by men, and too effeminate to take it without protest and without whining, the backbone of. the moral world will have lost much of its proper rigidity.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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