Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/107

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ETHICS OF BOXING AND MANLY SPORT.

To show the progress in boxing between Broughton's day and ours, the reader is referred to the Appendix for the best code of rules to govern glove contests that has ever been drawn up. They are the product of a Boston man, Mr. David Blanchard.


XV.
BOXING COMPARED WITH OTHER EXERCISES.

Prize-Fighting is not the aim of boxing. This noble exercise ought not to be judged by the dishonesty or the low lives of too many of its professional followers. Let it stand alone, an athletic practice, on the same footing as boating or foot-ball.

Putting prize-fighting altogether aside as one of the unavoidable evils attending on this manly exercise, the inestimable value of boxing as a training, discipline, and development of boys and young men remains.

All other athletic exercises, with one exception, are limited or partial in their physical development. That exception is swimming. Swimming takes the whole muscular system into play, uniformly and powerfully. Lungs, heart, trunk, and