RACE AND SPORT.
BRITISH sportsmen have begun to signalize Victory Year by a vigorous revival of the sports and games for which their country is world-famous, and which have been in abeyance for nearly five years. The British spirit of sport, shared by Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, and Americans, did much to win the war; it is a per- manent source of moral. An interesting feature of this year** sport will be its international character, but the competition will be chiefly between nations of the Anglo-Saxon race. France, Belgium, and Rumania, however, one is glad to note, will ha represented. Hundreds of soldier-athletes from oversee are spending the year here for the purpose of joining in competiti vs play. Long-continued active service produces a nervous and
muscular tension, which apparently early physical Play can relieve.
The question is worth asking how far is racial character a factor in the invention and development of sports and games. Environment has had its influence; there have been transmission and borrowing, as in other forms of culture ; but what we style " national " games are ultimately a reflex of race. Ex post facia argument must be avoided in this question ; it would be absurd to say that, cricket having been invented by Englishmen and golf by Scotsmen, no other races could have invented them, because no other races did. At the outset we have the axiomatic facts that all races have independently evolved: in sport--hunting and shooting; in games—some form of hockey, that is, in its lowest terms, the propulsion of a ball or its equivalent by means of a hand-wielded instrument, a club or stick. It is agreed that this primitive hockey is the ancestor of most ball-games—golf, tennis, lawn tennis, pelota, pallone, rackets, lacrosse, polo, cricket, croquet, billiards. Two varieties of it can also be established as primitive, those in which the hand or the foot is used instead of an instrument. Technically, a hand-wielded instrument is an extension of the band, and a boot, or ski, or skate an extension of the foot; but it does not follow that the human weapons were used before the artificial. The evidence is the other way.
Cricket is typically English in origin and development. America is less Anglo-Saxon than Australasia and South Africa; it has been exploited in the last two but not in the first of these coontries. Simultaneously with the French, the English developed from hockey a game in which a wicket (or small "gate ") was defended by the club against the ball. But here is the difference—the English applied the principle and methods of team-work. Team-work may safely be regarded as a specially English and British characteristic ; the British " square" is a case of it.
Similarly with football. The Italians of the Renaissance developed football into a sort of military operation conducted in the great piazzas. The idea of organizing the old English festival game of driving a football down the village street seems to have been stimulated in the schools of England by the example of Italy. And as with cricket, so with football, English team- work, especially encouraged in English schools, proceeded on a line very typically English ; this is non-military. When it was said that we English take our pleasures sadly, the implication was that we think out the beet form of team-work for the game in question, and military formations do not apply to any game as such. We apply to play the principles of team-work as seriously (or " sadly ") as we apply them to business.
A very.obvioua application of the hockey principle, club and ball, is to bit at a mark. The Dutch had a game of this kind, played in inn-yards and on the ice. It is a question whether this was transmitted to our islands, to become golf. By the way, the game was played in Southern England long before it took root in Scotland. There seems to be no particular British characteristic that explains the development of golf by the British, unless it be the individualism involved, and individual. ism is certainly as British a quality as team-work. Again. the British temperament is phlegmatic ; this quality is very well expressed by such games as cricket and golf and croquet.
The French, the Italians, and the Spaniards, the so.called Latin peoples, are temperamentally more excitable, and phy. Biologically quicker in reaction-time, than the Anglo-Saxon, Hence their pre-eminence in sword-play and their aptitude for such rapid games as lawn tennis. But their resistance-capacity is less than that of the British ; the severe physical strain of football, boxing, and wrestling, for instance, is a permanent bar to their general adoption. There have been distinguished individual exceptions, though very few, and here it is rapidity of reaction that has been the main factor.
Lack of resistance has conditioned in a curious way the develop. ment of certain sports in the Middle East. To avoid the strain of running, hockey on horseback was invented, and became polo. Similarly for big-game hunting the elephant was used to carry the hunters, whereas the British hunter in Africa uses his legs.
As for races without a genius for games, we may instance the Jews, the ancient Greeks, and the Russians. The Greeks were pre-eminent in athletics, but seem to have invented one game only, a primitive forms of hand-ball, analogous to football, the ball being thrown, not kicked.
Some form of card-game seems to have been independently invented by all races.
Lastly, if the ethic of sport belongs to its essence, we may credit the Anglo-Saxon with the highest measure of genius for play. Fair play ie his essential characteristic, and is proverbial among other races. Even in fox-hunting the quarry has a sporting chance ; the battue is un-English ; the knocked-out boxer is given grace. The F.nglialuan " playa the game."
A. E. CRAWLEY.
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