church. Self must be merged and a sportsmanlike spirit cultivated that prefers defeat to tricks and secret practise, and a clean game to the applause of rooters and fans, intent only on victory, however won. The long, hard fight against professionalism that brings in husky muckers, who by every rule of true courtesy and PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES chivalry belong outside academic circles, scrapping and underhand advantages, is a sad comment on the char- acter and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best of their educational advantages. The necessity of inter- vention, which has imposed such great burdens on facul- ties and brought so much friction with the frenzy of scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal enthu- siasms, when fanned to a white heat by the excessive interest of friends and patrons and the injurious ex- ploitation of the press, bears sad testimony to the strength and persistence of warlike instincts from our heredity. But even thus the good far predominates. The elective sj^stem has destroyed the class games, and our institutions have no units like the English colleges to be pitted against each other, and so, as colleges grow, an ever smaller percentage of students obtain the benefit of practise on the teams, while electioneering methods often place second-best men in place of the best. But both students and teachers are slowly learning wisdom in the dear school of experience. On the whole, there is less license in " breaking training " and in celebrating victories, and even at their worst, good probably pre- dominates, while the progress of recent years bids us hope.
Finally, military ideals and methods of psycho- physical education are helpful regulations of the ap- petite for combat, and on the whole more wholesome and robust than those which are merely esthetic. March- ing in step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of body; the manual of arms, with evolution and involution of figures in the ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves care of personal appearance and accouterments, while the uniform levels social distinction in dress. For the YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE French and Italian and especially the German and Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the two or three years of compulsory military service is often compared to an academic course, and the army is called, not with- out some justification, the poor man's university. It gives severe drill, strict discipline, good and regular hours, plain but wholesome fare and out-of-door exer- cise, exposure, travel, habits of neatness, many useful knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play battles; these, apart from its other functions, make this system a great promoter of national health and intelli- gence. Naval schools for midshipmen, who serve before the mast, schools on board ship that visit a wide curricu- lum of ports each year, cavalry schools, where each boy is given a horse to care for, study and train, artillery courses and even an army drill-master in an academy, or uniform, and a few exterior features of soldierly life, all give a distinct character to the spirit of any in- stitution. The very fancy of being in any sense a soldier opens up a new range of interests too seldom utilized; and tactics, army life and service, military his- tory, battles, patriotism, the flag, and duties to country, should always erect a new standard of honor. Youth should embrace every opportunity that offers in this line, and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual opportunities created by every interest in warfare. It would be easy to create pregnant courses on how sol- diers down the course of history have lived, thought, felt, fought, and died, how great battles were won and what causes triumphed in them, and to generalize many of the best things taught in detail in the best schools of war in different grades and lands.
A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest factors of all adolescent sport. Male birds PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES and beasts show off their charms of beauty and accom- plishment in many a liturgy of love antics in the presence of the female. This instinct seems somehow continuous with the growth of ornaments in the mating season. Song, tumbling, balking, mock fights, etc., are forms of animal courtship. The boy who turns cart- wheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant, brave, Avitty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere dull and commonplace enough, illustrates the same prin- ciple. The true cake-walk as seen in the South is pre- haps the purest expression of this impulse to courtship antics seen in man, but its irradiations are many and pervasive. The presence of the fair sex gives tonicity to youth's muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of which he is rarely conscious. Defeat in all contests is more humiliating and victory more glorious thereby. Each sex is constantly passing the examination of the other, and each judges the other by standards dif- ferent from its own. Alas for the young people who are not different with the other sex from what they are with their own! — and some are transformed into different be- ings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend, bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong, and victorious. This stimu- lus is wholesome and refining. As is shown later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker and is sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE movement by a sense of her presence, stranger and ap- parently imnotieed though she be, although in the intel- lectual work of coeducation girls are most influenced thus. In athletics this motive makes for refinement and good form. The ideal knight, however fierce and terri- ble, must not be brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling, tenderness, magnanimity, and forbearance. Evolution- ists tell us that woman has domesticated and educated savage man and taught him all his virtues by exercising her royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating others distasteful to her. If so, she is still engaged in this work as much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to him to compromise in one iota his masculinity. Most plays and games in which both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the disadvantages of coeducation. Where both are partners rather than antagonists, there is less eviration. A gallant man would do his best to help, but his worst not to beat a lady. Thus, in general, the latter performs her best service in her true role of sympathetic spectator rather than as fellow player, and is now an important factor in the physical education of adolescents.
How pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our schools, is strikingly seen in the church. Gulick holds that the reason why only some seven per cent of the young men of the country are in the churches, while most members and workers are women, is that the qualities demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, prayer, trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of atonement — traits not involving ideals that most stir young men. The church has not yet learned to appeal to PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES the more virile qualities. Fielding Hall ^ asks why Christ and Buddha alone of great religious teachers were re- jected by their own race and accepted elsewhere. He answers that these mild beliefs of peace, nonresistance, and submission, rejected by virile warrior races, Jews and ancient Hindus, were adopted where women were free and led in these matters. Confucianism, Moham- medanism, etc., are virile, and so indigenous, and in such forms of faith and worship women have small place. This again suggests how the sex that rules the heart con- trols men.
Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at this age. Marro - quotes Father Kneipp, and almost rivals his hydrotherapeutic enthusi- asm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward partly by the cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and tissue immediately underlying it, and partly by the pres- sure of the water over all the dermal surface, quickens the activity of kidneys, lungs, and digestive apparatus, and the reactive glow is the best possible tonic for der- mal circulation. It is the best of all gymnastics for the nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the heart and blood vessels. This and the removal of the products of excretion preserve all the important dermal func- tions which are so easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the liability to skin diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects of plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not in- considerable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The exercise of swimming is unique in that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as are rarely used 1 The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, 1901, chap. xxii.
2 La Puberty. Schleicher Freres, editeurs, Paris, 1902.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and lib- eral rather than directly preparatory for future avoca- tions. Its stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general consent of all writers upon the subject, most wholesome and beneficial. Nothing so directly or quickly reduces to the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs. The very absence of clothes and running on the beach is ex- hilarating and gives a sense of freedom. Where prac- ticable it is well to dispense with bathing suits, even the scantiest. The warm bath tub is enfeebling and degen- erative, despite the cold spray later, while the free swim in cold water is most invigorating.
Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly realizing the great improvement in health and temper that comes from bathing and are establish- ing beach and surf, spray, floating and plunge summer baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, treading water, and rescue work, free as well as fee days, bathing suits, and, in London, places for nude bathing after dark; establishing time and distance standards with certificates and even prizes; annexing toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference of youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably noth- ing outranks this form of exercise. Such is its strange fascination that, according to one comprehensive census, the passion to get to the water outranks all other causes of truancy, and plays an important part in the motiva- tion of runaways. In the immense public establishment near San Francisco, provided by private munificence, there are accommodations for all kinds of bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees of fresh and salt water, in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small children and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES one great covered arena with seats in an amphitheater for two thousand spectators, and many adjuncts and accessories. So elsewhere the presence of visitors is now often invited and provided for. Sometimes wash-houses and public laundries are annexed. Open hours and longer evenings and seasons are being prolonged.
Prominent among the favorite games of early pu- berty and the years just before are those that involve passive motion and falling, like swinging in its many forms, including the May-pole and single rope varieties. Mr. Lee reports that children wait late in the evening and in cold weather for a turn at a park swing. Psy- chologically allied to these are wheeling and skating. Places for the latter are now often provided by the fire department, which in many cities floods hundreds of empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and horse- plowed, perhaps by the park commission, which often provides lights and perhaps ices the walks and streets for coasting, erects shelters, and devises space economy for as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible. Games of hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, hockey, tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf and croquet, and sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have great " thum- ogenic " or emotional power.
Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part. Man is by definition an upright being, but only after a long apprenticeship.^ Thus the hand was freed from the necessity of locomotion and made the servant of the mind. Locomotion overcomes the tendency to sedentary habits in modern schools and life, and helps the mind to helpful action, so that a peri- » See A. W. Trettien. Creeping and Walking. American Journal of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE patetic philosophy is more normal than that of the easy chair and the study lamp. Hill-climbing is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. If Hip- pocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a moun- tain-top. Walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting are also alterative and regulative of sex, and there is a deep and close though not yet fully explained reci- procity between the two. Arm work is relatively too prominent a feature in gymnasia. Those who lead ex- cessively sedentary lives are prone to be turbulent and extreme in both passion and opinion, as witness the oft- adduced revolutionary disposition of cobblers.
The play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to many other things. Roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and even school-buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions and out- ings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem to distinctly augment growth; occupation during the long vacation when, beginning with spring, most juve- nile crime is committed; theatricals, which according to some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile de- linquents; boys ' clubs with more or less self-government of the George Junior Republic and other types, treated in another chapter; nature-study; the distinctly different needs and propensities of both good and evil in different nationalities; the advantages of playground fences and exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value as resting places; the liability that *' the boy without a playground will become the father without a job "; the relation of play and its slow transition to manual and industrial education at the savage age when a boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting interest, not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of play to sex; the determination of PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES the proper average age of maximal zest in and good from sand-box, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg-top, charity, funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and right use of apparatus, and of rabbits, pig- eons, bees, and a small menagerie in the playground; tan-bark, clay, the proper alternation of excessive free- dom, that often turns boys stale through the summer, with regulated activities; the disciplined " work of play ' ' and sedentary games; the value of the washboard in rubbing and of the hand and knee exercise of scrub- bing, which a late writer would restore for all girls with clever and Greek-named play apparatus; as well as dig- ging, shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carry- ing exercises in the form of games for boys; the relations of women's clubs, parents' clubs, citizens' leagues and unions, etc., to all this work — such are the practical problems.
The playground movement encounters its chief ob- stacles in the most crowded and slum districts, where its greatest value and success was expected for boys in the early teens, who without supervision are prone to commit abuses upon property and upon younger children,^ and are so disorderly as to make the place a nuisance, and who resent the " fathering " of the police, without, at least, the minimum control of a system of permits and ex- clusions. If hoodlums play at all, they become infat- uated with baseball and football, especially punting; they do not take kindly to the soft large ball of the Hull House or the Civic League, and prefer at first scrub games with individual self-exhibition to organized teams. Lee sees the * ' arboreal instincts of our progenitors ' ' in the very strong propensity of boys from ten to fourteen ' Constructive and Preventive Philantliropy, by Joseph Lee. Mac- millan, New York, 1902, chaps, x and xi.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE to climb in any form; to use traveling rings, generally occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump from steps and catch a swinging trapeze; to go up a lad- der and slide down poles; to use horizontal and parallel bars. The city boy has plenty of daring at this age, but does not know what he can do and needs more super- vision than the country youth. The young tough is com- monly present, and though admired and copied by younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often for his heroic as for his bad traits.
Dr. Sargent and others have well pointed out that athletics afford a wealth of new and profitable topics for discussion and enthusiasm which helps against the tri- viality and mental vacuity into which the intercourse of students is prone to lapse. It prompts to discussion of diet and regimen. It gives a new standard of honor. For a member of a team to break training would bring repro- bation and ostracism, for he is set apart to win fame for his class or college. It supplies a splendid motive against all errors and vices that Aveaken or corrupt the body. It is a wholesome vent for the reckless courage that would otherwise go to disorder or riotous excess. It supplies new and advantageous topics for composi- tions and for terse, vigorous, and idiomatic theme-writ- ing, is a great aid to discipline, teaches respect for deeds rather than words or promises, lays instructors under the necessity of being more interesting, that their work be not jejune or dull by contrast; again the business side of managing great contests has been an admirable school for training young men to conduct great and difficult financial operations, sometimes involving $100,000 or more, and has thus prepared some for successful careers. It furnishes now the closest of all links between high school and college, reduces the number of those phys- PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES ically unfit for college, and should give education gen- erally a more real and vigorous ideal. Its obvious dan- gers are distraction from study and overestimation of the value of victory, especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the popular furor give to great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and methods, over- emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics; friction with faculties, and censure or neglect of in- structors who take unpopular sides on hot questions; reaction toward license after games, spasmodic excite- ment culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, with alternations of reaction; *' beefiness "; overdevel- opment of the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental toil seem monotonous, dull, and boresome.
The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls regimentation, is an outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play. This, to be sure, has developed old-fashioned rounders to modern baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the elaborate Draconian laws, diplomacy, judicial and leg- islative procedures, concerning " eligibility, transfer, and even sale of players. ' ' In some games international conformity is gravely discussed. Even where there is no tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily ham- pering nature and the free play of personality. Togs and targets, balls and bats, rackets and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every emer- gency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic mar- Ill YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE tinet, jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and professionalism. Not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. Runners, sprinters, and jumpers,^ we are told, on the basis of many careful measurements, must be tall, with slender bodies, narrow but deep chests, longer legs than the average for their height, the lower leg being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms, nar- row hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of small girth. Every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer individual adjustments. His dosage of work must be kept well within the limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his recuperative power. His personal nascent periods must be noted, and initial embarrassment carefully weeded out.
The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber those of industries and occupations in the census. Plays and games differ in seasons, sex, and age. McGhee ^ has shown on the basis of some 8,000 children, that running plays are pretty constant for boys from six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind boys and run steadily less from eight to eighteen. In games of choice, boys showed a slight rise at sixteen and seventeen, and girls a rapid increase at eleven and a still more rapid one after sixteen. In games of imita- tion girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight, pubescent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys ' C. O. Bemies. Physical Characteristics of the Runner and Jumper. American Physical Education Review, September, 1900, vol. 5, pp.
• A Study in the Play Life of some South Carolina Children. Peda- gogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 459-478.
PLAY, SPORTS, AND GAMES at first greatly excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year, both showing marked pubescent increment. Girls have the largest number of plays and specialize on a few less than boys, and most of these plays are of the unorganized kinds. Johnson ^ se- lected from a far larger number 440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a course by school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and also according to their educational value as teaching ob- servation, reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, geography, history, and biography, physical training, and specifically as training legs, hand, arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. ]\Iost of our best games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But children are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Con- gress in 1894 the sentiment has grown that these are of national importance and are preferable to gymnastics both for soul and body. Hence we have play-schools, teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work. Several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be given by plays and games alone on the principle that there is no profit where there is no pleasure or true euphoria.