An Antidote to Revolution.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 12, 21 March 1908, Page 66

An Antidote to Revolution.

A bishop is among those people no ordinary man can understand. Like motorists, Japanese, diabolo players, geniuses, and landladies, his point of view is special and peculiar; you may greatly respect his attitude towards you or towards life, but generally you have to admit that there is a certain divergence of sentiment and opinion between him ami you and between him and most of his fellow-creatures. His theology may agree with yours, you may admire his taste in pictures, and you may concede him all intelligence and most of Abe virtues. But suddenly he will reveal 4hat special point of view, emphasize that episcopal bias of personality, and all resolves itself into profoundest mystery and wonderment. At first sight one Is surprised that a bishop should find the solution of Russia’s troubles in more football and the growth ot a sportsmanlike esprit de corps. To most of us Russia is the centre of every evil that despotism can bring into being; to most of us it appears that Russia waits more and not less of a spirit of revolt; to most of us these young university students who rage at the evils around them are honourable young pioneers, and something more than dreamy boys who don’t get enough football! Such a view as the Bishop of London’s strikes me as essentially episcopal, don-like, remote from every tenet of ordinary men. And then one ceases to be surprised, and one’s only wonder is that one forgot that it was not an ordinary man who uttered such views. And if the Bishop of Loiiuon’s sentiments seem strange, at least his standpoint is simple. Here arc the steps in his argument (whether or not he is conscious of the inner reasons for his own belief): (1) All disorders are reprehensible; (2) Conservatism Dieveuts disorders; (3) sports tend to maintain conservatism; therefore (4) sports tend to prevent disorders, and will be the salvation of Russia. I shall not attempt to dissect this argument, and shall merely content myself with pointing out that (1) —the major premiss—while satisfactory to the episcopal mind, is at least open to the gravest question by every ordinary man (Who nevertheless may be . utterly in error).; and shall proceed to discuss (3) without much further reference to bishops and their episcopal attitude. Granted that conservatism rs the ideal • —that all revolt against constituted authority in Russia is wrong—l believe tiiat the- Bishop has really discovered a panacea. Sports, do tend to conservatism—and that conviction was implanted in my mind Jong before 1 encountered Dr. Winuington-lngram’s application of the fact to Russia. And there are two outstanding reasons why it should be so. In the first place, tlife mind of an athletic man, or, at least, of a man who makes sports the central interest of his life, dwells essentially in the present. The future of football is hardly beset by jiroblems or made inspiring by its importance. Secondly, athletes form their athletic aristocracies from their earliest years, and the idea of the necessity of aristocracies grows with tire idea of a rule based on physical achievement, a hero-worship founded on pre eminence in games. If we want a third reason, we can advance the most obvious of all—that other questions are apt to be sacrificed whim a consuming passion for sport occupies the major portion of the mental horizon. So I think the Bishop is essentially right in claiming that sports really do make for a conservative view of life and the acceptance of an ideal formed on present attainment".

It is not always the most obvious or the most imposing circumstance that serves the biggest purpose in social evolution; ami 1 think that the sociologist, with all his high-flying theories, might very well have allowed a little more weight to the influence of athletic sports on the reforming spirit of the race. The “public” school in the English sense of the word (meaning a large boarding-school or what is called a “college” here) is facile princeps as a breeder of sheer, unadulterated conservatism. The superficial view of such a result might easily lead us to suppose that it was merely the effect of a more or less wealthy parentage. But I don't think that this altogether holds, inasmuch as the boys for nine months in the year (as J.ord I’hinket so pertinently pointed out) nne more or less “roughing lt”nnd undergoing a hardening process on an exceedingly plain diet and under other conditions the reverse of luxurious. The

duke’s son is no better than the brewer’s son, unless he is better at football, or unless, through the effects of football, he has what strikes the boyish mind as. a more commanding personality. There is, then, an aristocracy, but it is an aristocracy based primarily on athletic efficiency. And how does this affect a boy’s subsequent outlook? In the first place, as we conceded before, he is living in the present;- in the second he has learned to look upon the gracefully athletic type as an ideal of manhood which largely shuts out other ideals from his admiration. He despises navvies infinitely less for anything else than that they are apt to walk with a slouch. Men who slouch must, by all his school traditions, be his inferiors; and classes that slouch in their gait are inferior classes. It is a narrow, a foolish, a paltry view of life, 1 grant you; but 1 believe that it exists as cne of the most potent factors in modern conservatism. Robert Louis Stevenson is, on the otherhand, perhaps rather extreme when he writes (in his “Island Voyage”): “The gymnast is not my favourite- he has little or no tincture of the artist in his composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for the most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, end does not accustom him to high ideas.” I prefer to remember as a generality covering a similarly wide ground, that judgment of Oliver Wendell Holmes that “To brag little, to show well, to crow gently if in luck,..to pay up, to own up. and to shut up, if beaten, are the virtues of a sporting, man”! The athlete has his virtues, and they ar.? not hard to discover; pur sole present consideration is whether he is qua athlete the friend or foe of liberal progress. And 1 hold he is more likely to be its foe than its Ifjend. Indeed, no man who idolises one type at the expense of the rest can be said to be exactly in the van of human progress. But Conservative forces, as well as Radical, being necessary ill the world, this does not amount to condemnation. One only wonders how it comes tiiat a learned bishop should wish in Russia of all countries to work things out to tHir logical conclusion in this particular respect. By PIERROT, in “Auckland Star,”