Room to Play
THE ascetic, Puritan or kill-joy view of play was false in its roots and poisonous in its fruits. Play is a necessity for all intelligent creatures. Intelligence is the capacity to learn, and we learn as we play : we learn neuro-muscular co-ordination, self-knowledge, self- control and, in the best games, such as this country chiefly has invented and given to mankind, we learn as well the subordination of self to Society.
Herbert Spencer followed the poet Schiller in regarding play as a mode of release for superfluous energy, as a psycho-physiological safety-valve. It may sometimes be that, but it is more than that. The modern psycho- logist Karl Groos has shown that play is rehearsal for life, necessary for intelligent animals, which can learn everything but have everything to learn. (A barnacle or a bee need not play : it lives, on the low level or the high, by instincts, born practically " perfect " and practi- cally incapable of improveinent.) Once we understand education we understand and respect play.
But even these views of play are inadequate, since they ignore its uses for the adult. These uses - may certainly be less urgent and essential than those for which the young need to play ; but they are none the less real. Adult play releases and relieves the mind from its worries and obsessions ; it gives the body a chance to exercise its natural neuro-muscular functions. A • game a day keeps the doctor away. The noble games teach and achieve more than all this. Thus we rightly honour cricket, the king of games, by saying of selfish or dis- honourable conduct that it is " not cricket " : meaning what the Japanese mean when they say that such con- duct is " not poetry." Cricket is moving poetry.
On our village greens and vicarage lawns, in past generations, we have evolved cricket and lawn tennis and the rounders of which baseball is an elaboration. But we have become the most densely urbanized people that have ever existed on the face of the earth. That is clearly shown by the census of 1921, and it is a fact of the foremost importance. Eighty per cent. of our people live in cities which, in terms of our new knowledge—so familiar to Hippocrates !—of the value of pure air and unpolluted sunlight, are scarcely to be called habitable. Nearly half a century after Koch's discovery of the tubercle bacillus, tuberculosis destroys us at the rate of nearly a thousand deaths every week ; yet we spend millions of pounds every year in the treatment of this disease alone. But in the sunlight and open air tubercle bacilli die in a few minutes ; and in sunlight and open air the human body is fortified and equipped to kill them, even if they enter it alive.
All over the world to-day our games are being played. It is a disconcerting compliment to find ourselves com- pelled to own defeat by our own pupils, but that is a common experience in recent times. It matters, because national prestige in games is not negligible : but it matters far less than that our games should be saving and serving the youth, which is the future, of other nations, but not our own. Everyone knows that Germany is a serious nation, that Germans work hard, and that they apply scientific methods and research to industry with consummate success. But they also rightly play : and W. T. Tilden, the tennis-player whom many of us, watching and playing the game for decades, regard as incomparable, and who has long been noteworthy not only as an artist and athlete on the court, but also in the attention he has given to the coaching of youngsters, has just warned his fellow-countrymen that their emin- ence in the game is likely soon to be challenged by some of the innumerable youths whom he has been watching on the municipal courts in Germany.
And our children ? Not even yet do we allow them to play in the garden-squares of London, even during the summer holidays. Despite the efforts of the Spectator and the Sunlight League during recent years, we still prefer that our children should play in the streets, which become every month more noisome and more dangerous. The future of our country is allowed to play " last across," or cricket, on asphalt, inhaling noxious exhaust from motor-cars ; and the numbers whom the cars crush to death increase rapidly every year. If the children have any inherent right, as inheritors of " glories of our blood and state," to food or to air or light or water, they also have the right to play ; and room to play must be found for them. If not, there will be found no room for the next generation of adults in the moral and intel- lectual leadership of mankind. History—and this is history—will repeat itself and the sceptre will pass into the hands of others, who will work and play hard, and learn the right to lead accordingly.
The Heir to the Throne has broadcast a plea for National Playing Fields. A million pounds are asked for. We spend more than that every year on sanatoria for tuberculosis under the Insurance Act, with miserable and heartbreaking results ; though a generation has passed since the Prince's grandfather asked of this disease the question, " If preventable, why not prevented ? " We spend three-quarters of a million every year on sporting cartridges. If such comparisons are to be continued, we may finally find ourselves contemplating the national bills for liquor and tobacco. Evidently we had better not pursue that subject if we hope to retain a shred of national self-respect. The only thing to do is to find the million pounds at once ; and then, if such a thing be thinkable, any other cause which can take another million and return so ample a dividend in life and health and beauty and joy.
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