THE GAMES

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4567, 10 November 1937, Page 6

THE GAMES

EQUIPMENT, DISCIPLINE AND EXERCISE. "Games are not an end in life, but a means to an end. They are an equipment, a discipline, an exercise," says Mr A. G. Gardiner in the Star. "I would rather that everyone played games for rational amusement and relaxation without caring twopence for championships than that a few people should play exquisitely and the rest not at all. "In this respect we still lead the world—certainly the European world. There is more golf and tennis played within fifty miles of London alone than in any country on the Continent.

"Paradoxically enough, it is our long start in the cult of organised games that is one of the reasons of our relative decline. "Give an Englishman a bat and ball, said Emerson a century ago, and his cup of happiness is full. "If he were living to-day he would know that his ovin countrymen, from New York to San Francisco, had fallen victims to ball games, and practise them with a lrenzy beyond all parallel in this country.

"It is this fact ihat explains the phenomenon. It is not that we have grown slack. New rivals have come into the field.

"Other nations from Chile to Japan, have caught the infection of the English games, and are throwing themselves into them with the fervour and passion of a new revelation. "We shall never recover our old supremicv in sport. The world has overtaken us; and the best we can expect is an occasional place in the sun.

"But nothing can deprive us of the glory of having taught the world to play games or the credit of having taught it to play them in the right spirit."