MORE ABOUT FOOTBALL by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 23, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 12.

MORE ABOUT FOOTBALL.

By Editor

WE quoted recently from two physicians, who contributed to Our Dumb Animals some striking facts and observations on football. In the same issue of that little journal was the following from its editor, Geo. T. Angell:—

On January 16 we received a letter giving the experiences of one of our football elevens, from which we take the following:—

"The game as now played is war—fighting." [Sometimes bets to large amounts depend on the result.]

"The best opposing player is to be put out of the game if possible."

"Under the heap the public see little of the real slugging going on—throwing sand in the eyes, etc., etc."

"It is a real battle, and if the facts were generally known, I think something would be done to stop it."

The above is given us in confidence that we will not use the name of the player.

To the above we add:—

1. That every policeman in Boston was ordered to be on duty all night in case Harvard had beaten Yale.

2. Our strongest objection to this modern football game is not the physical injuries of the fighters, or the ten thousand gambling bets, but that it tends to build up in our educated young men a spirit of fighting, which has already cost us in the unnecessary war about Cuba (which Spain was willing to abandon without firing a single gun) and the unnecessary war about the Philippines, which Spain was glad to sell for twenty millions of dollars, and both of which have cost us not only great unnecessary destruction of human and animal life and hundreds of millions of dollars, but a large pension list for the next fifty years—a spirit of fighting, which may cost us in the not very distant future more than a hundred thousand lives, a billion of dollars, and perhaps sooner than we expect the destruction of our American Republic, and the formation of a government, in which half the men will be enrolled in standing armies to keep the other half in subjection.

3. Looking at many of our colleges, as they now are, and seeing how rapidly they are building up this fighting spirit, and how little they are doing to educate their undergraduates humanely, and considering the conflicts likely to come up, not only with foreign nations but between capital and labor in our own, we can not help being reminded (as we were at the close of the talks about comparatively unimportant matters of our great national convention of teachers in Boston last summer) how Nero fiddled while Rome was burning.