Sport
spirit. Your spirit is sport: particularly your young men, who are not yet absorbed in the struggle for existence, and whose emotions are therefore for the largest part free, must find in sport, in games, in contests, the most satisfactory expression of their instincts.
For the most part, of course, both professor and public, despite occasional jokes at their own expense and at the expense of the institution, sympathize with the attitude of the young and encourage it not only by their energetic interest in organized sport outside, but by the passionate attention with which they follow the sporting records of the colleges. It is a commonplace that the scholastic achievements of the universities are both unintelligible and uninteresting to the vast mass of graduates, and that academic work can in no wise compete with athletic achievement in taking the heart and interest both of these and of the general public. And even those who can understand the content of scholastic achievement are also drawn more powerfully toward sporting achievement.
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