August 21.
Tur formation in England of an Amateur Football Association marks an important date not only: in the game which it is specially designed to reform, but in the history of all athletics. Professionism versus amateurism is no new controversy. There have been professional in cricket since its infancy; as witness the invention of round-arm bowling in 1785 by Tom Walker who was a professional of the old Hambledon Cricket Club, But whether it is that professionalism in football lacks that antiquity which makes professionalism in cricket respectable—for even if the steward, in King Lear, who is abused as a "base football player was a professional, of which there is no evidence, he certainly played no game that at all resembles our modern football or that the rader characteristics of football expose it to the worse abuse through the introduction of men who play for money instead of for love, it is at least the fact that Association football has rapidly been losing caste as well as sporismanship in recent years, and the need of some such body as the one now formed has been proportionately felt The new Association is composed of men whose names alone are a guarantee of the earnestness of its intentions. Its president is the Lord Chief Justice who as Mr. Webster of Trinity College, Cambridge, won the University mile in the sixties, Mr. Alfred Lyttelton who belongs to one of the greatest athletic illes took the chair at the Association's first meeting. Mr. R. C. Guy, a former well-known captain of Oxford; Mr. Cobbold one of the most brilliant forwards who ever played for Cambridge Mr. Vassal, younger brother of the captain "of the immortal Rugby team at Oxford, and—himsif a distinguished runner and layer of—Association—_foot-I; these and many more of the flower of amateur utbletics are among the officers of the new Association.
Objection to professionalism in football is based on nothing so in-dions us objection to the pro fessional themselves, who with few exceptions ure fine fellows physically, morally and as sportsmen, The very spirit of their service compels them to sink their own individuality inthe welfare of the team, and tends thereby to check the selfishness and playing to the gallery which combine at the lust make an athlete equally obnoxious to his fellows on and off the field. The fault rather ith the men who control the limited companies which the great Association football clubs have now become. A professional football player is an expensive product who must be tended and safeguarded as such to the utmost of his proprietors' ability. We may pass over the endless regulitions which have been framed to prevent the transfer of players from one club to another, or the employment of secret detectives perpetaally on the watch to frustrate unscrupulous attempts to bribe or kidnap this or that—brilliant exponent of the game, as things which, though abhorrent to the idea of true sport, are not necessarily inimical to the enjoyment of am-afears. But the necessity of shielding the professional football player from accident, in order that the club books should show as little unproductive outlay as possible, has led undoubtedly to alterations in rules by the Football Association (cor-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.