Life — April 4, 1895 — page 4: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

* LIFE: “While there io Life there's Hope VOL. XXV. APRIL 4, 1895. tg West Tuirty-First Street, New York. No. 640. Published every Thursday. $5.00 year in advance. Postage to foreign countries in the Postal Union, $1.04 a year, extra. Single copies, 10 cents. Rejected contributions will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped and directed envelope. DOLOROUS cry comes from Cam- bridge over the action of the Harvard Faculty in confirming the recent expression of its disapproval of intercollegiate football. A It does not lie with the Harvard faculty S22 to determine positively whether Harvard undergraduates shall play intercollegiate matches or not. The final decision rests with the overseers. Nevertheless the action of the faculty is thought to be very ominous, and the football cap- in, after issuing a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger manifesto, has notified the candidates for his team that they This apparent submission of young ences, may go out of training. Harvard to the views of a Faculty of the Arts and having limited authority and no pretence to expert knowledge of sport, cannot fail to amaze the contemporary observer. T has been held and reiterated for some years past by an enlightened press that football was the chief end of all our greater institutions of learning, and that study was merely incident to the cultivation of athletic sports. But now when the Harvard faculty puts its foot down on football, instead of tidings of riot and rebellion and the calling out of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery of Boston, to quell disturbances, there comes no news from Cambridge e: cept of sorrowful submission, qualitied by faint hopes of succor from the Board of It is passing strange and very It seems almost possible that Overseers. unexpected. it may have penetrated the intelligences of the Harvard undergraduates themselves that football of late years has been over- done, and that all intercollegiate competitions would better be conducted with less bickering, less splurge, less sharp practice and at less expense if any of them are to survive. Football decently played is a good game, but of late years the utmost efforts of its truest friends to get it decently played, have too often been futile. If it cannot be played without’ brutality, let it sleep awhile, until undergraduates (and graduates, too, they are just as bad), grow wiser. * . . MODERN seems to offer a temptation to a_ rich nation ; that is closely analogous to that wei: which an abundance of good foot- ball material offers to a great university. It seems a pity to leave it idle, when so much glory and popularity can be derived from putting it into active use. Every time that Uncle Sam gets a chance nowa- days to get into trouble with any of his neighbors a legion of vociferous patriots cry to him to get out his ships and let them do something to interest the people and promote the sale of newspapers. But the truth is that it is just about as. important for Uncle Sam to be a great naval power as it for Harvard University to be a great football power. He ought to have a reasonable number of good ships and to make himself respected on the sea, but naval supremacy is not really in his line. His business is to keep the peace, and to maintain such conditions at home and such relations with foreign countries that his seventy-five millions of children can have the best possible chance to grow up and be educated and progress and prosper. Harvard University needs football enough to give her young men exercise; Uncle Sam needs ships enough to protect his commerce. He does not need ships for ad- vertising purposes any more than Harvard needs football teams for that use. HE innin cold ¢ is nearly It is still an af- fliction—never more so indeed than at this time of the year when it dis- courages the effects of spring and dispenses pneumonia and the grip. Presently it will lose part of its identity and become known in the weather reports as merely “cooler,” and in another quarter it will shed its husk entirely and bloom out with new wings as the blessed .“ cool wave” that is the friend of infancy, and makes things generally comfortable. But don’t trifle with it because it going to reform. Every year it makes permanent April fools of numbers of incautious people whom it catches out in their spring clothes. of the over.