p. 16 | A Strange Consistency by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 27, 1896

A Strange Consistency.

By Editor

Prize-fighting is a brutal practice at its best, and its associations are degrading. But in the evil results following we would like to know what better is football as played by our crack college and university teams. Often a football game is characterized as a “slugging match,” and quite frequently men are “knocked out,” rendered insensible, arms, legs, and heads are broken, and not infrequently lives are lost. Of course no one meant to kill another. The great desire is to win the game of skill, science, and brute strength. But all this is true of the “manly art” of pugilism. The bull-fights of “Christian” Mexico and France are worse still, yet the forum prohibits pugilism. In a recent Sunday bull-fight at Juarez, at which all classes of society from both sides of the national boundary line were present, there were four bulls and five horses tortured and killed. When men fight, they do it voluntarily, knowing all the risks, and are wholly responsible, brutal and degrading tho the practice is, but the torturing, goading, disemboweling of innocent cattle and horses are quite another matter. In France last year there were 3,657 bulls killed, and more than six thousand horses ripped up. It is a strange sort of consistency which will permit the brutal football, prevalent of late, the wicked hazing of boys in our colleges and universities, and the cruel bull-fights to continue almost without protest, while prohibiting or anathematizing pugilism, brutal tho it may be. If these moral spasms were somewhat more chronic in nature, and more widespread and equable in application, even to the control of gigantic trusts and syndicates which oppress the poor, rob the state, and debauch Legislatures, there would be some hope of the body politic. True morality takes hold of individual life in a community first. So much pretension is not then needed in public life.