You Gentiles
the chief passion not inevitably aroused by the struggle for existence, the chief spiritual passion, was sport: witness the elaborate religious celebration of sporting events built on athletic contests: witness the adulation, the love, that was poured out to athletic prodigies; witness the dedication of the highest, most inspired talents, to their glorification: witness the tremendous mass passions enlisted in sporting events in Athens, in Rome, in Byzantium and elsewhere.
But in this regard, as in most others, history is by far less important than contact with life. I need not study history or read books to know what sport means to you. I have only to feel the emotions around me, read your newspapers, watch the records of your universities. The most certain, the most consistent, the most sustained and intense free emotion in your life is sport. And when here in America (as, indeed, elsewhere too) some of your professors and educationalists deplore and condemn the preponderating rôle of sport in the schools, they fail to understand your
40
