The Prize Ring.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1060, 23 June 1892, Page 27

The Prize Ring.

WHAT IT WAS AND WHAT IT IS. The great glove fight between Peter Jack* son and Frank Slavin afforded the Sydney Morning Herald its text for a very interesting leading article on the prize ring in connection with the progress of civilisation. After a general reference to the great lights of old times it concludes with the following clever analysis of the difference between the old and present regime :

When we remember that after the great fight of 1860, in spite of tho momentary stimulus which that gave to pugilism, prizefighting steadily declined in favour, and was severely repressed by the police, while a special Act of Parliament was passed to prevent railway companies fgpdr conveying persons to a prize-fight, many be disposed to ask, in view of the late revival of pugilism, whether, after all, prize-fighting is to be one of the attendants of progress, and one of the graces of the higher civilisation. The answer to this question is that civilisation has many resources, and is very clever in escaping from its own prohibitions when it desires to do so. Why prize-fighting wa3 condemned to suppression a quarter of a century ago was because its brutalities and savagery had shocked the mind and conscience of the public, and it was felt that the time had come to end it. Not that all of the moat celebrated pugilists were necessarily ruffians. In his well-known description of the immortal fight between Bill Neate and the Gasman, Hazlitt has borne testimony that such heroeß as Belcher, Tom Cribb, and the Game Chloken ‘ were civil, silent men/ though ‘ not men for everyone to take by the nose.’ But the question is how a sport which was condemned as brutal and debasing 25 years ago has again become ; reconciled to the more highly developed conscience of to-day. It is in such situations as this that the adroitness and intellectual resource of an age of mental and moral refinement best display themselves. After all, that moral advance achieved in the period of virtuous impulse after the great fight did not quite extirpate the combative instinct from lnuiian nature/ Though the Peace Society has ;beenrin active existence all this time, we stilly* relish of''it.' Suoh homicidal romances as ~those of Mr Rider Haggard and their adoration of ‘ a great and mighty fight ’ rely for, their success on their appeal to the ineradicable pugnacity of average human kind. There seems in reoent years to have been a hankering to revive those contests at which some years ago society shuddered as savagely brutal. And this is where the astuteness of the highly civilised conscience was displayed. The virtuous English moral sentiment in these fin de siecle days happily remembers that though it, in its perhaps premature moments of exultatior, condemned prize-fighting, it did not condemn the manly art of boxing. Prize-fighting is low and barbarous; it appeals only to the depraved tastes of sporting peers and costermongers ; while boxing is a noble art, admirably adapted to stiffen the nerves, to train the eye, and develop the muscles. This principle was one useful bit of driftwood fished up from ‘ the wreck of the past, which had perished ’ in a moment of too highly strung moral impulse. Advanced civilisation next attacked the important and critical subject of tho gloves. The gloves indeed were tho key of the situation. The whole difference between low prize fighting and the harmless, not to say laudable, exercise of boxing lies in the gloves. Gloves, yes ; but what sort of gloves? The advanced and enlightened modern conscience when it insisted on gloves forgot to define precisely what constituted a glove. Gentlemen of ‘ the fancy ’ have repaired the omission, and have solved this problem in the experimental fashion recommended by the Baconian inductive philosophy. In this process the glove ha» become ‘ fine by degrees, and beautifully less/ till were it not for the name, and, we may add, the morality and conscientiousness of the thing, the glove might as well be oast aside altogether. As our cabled report shows, the presence of the glove need not in any way interfere with' the effectiveness of the process. The details supplied show that the use of the gloves is quite compatible with very hard hitting, and with what, had we not been taught better, we might regard as all the brutality of the old prize fight. We believe that there is a theory that one advantage of a glove fight is that it is finished more quickly and more decisively than one with bare fists, and that the combatants, however roughly used, are all right next morning. Probably this is but a pious opinion, furnished by the ingenuity of the members of ‘ the fancy ’ to serve as a salve to the sensitive feelings of the public. However this may be, it cannot be denied that the total is a triumph of civilisation. - It allows the fight to take place with conditions of reality and savagery indistinguishable from those of the old system, it brings it within the tolerance and indeod the protection of the law and the patronage of the best,society, and it happily reconciles the procedure to the susceptible conscience of the highly moral uiueteeitfti ?eatw r } r - v