The Cooperstown courier. (Cooperstown, Griggs Co., N.D.) 1902-1913, 1905-09-14
BY MARGARET E. sANGsrER.

OF our breakfast table discussions.
Everybody reads the reports in the
newspapers, everybody rushes to see
the games, everybody praises, crit
1cises, shouts for gladness or groans
for vexation, according as the people
he or she cares for lose or win
We are more and more clarifying
athletics. To hear us, one would
fancy that our universities existed,
not to make scholars, but to send
forth runners and racers and cham
pions in the football field. The old
proves of knights armed cap-a-pie,
who met in tilt and tournament in
the middle ages, is at present trans
ferred to the gymnasium and the open
plain, where we'll matched parties con-
tend in stubborn fight.
MIR. Carnegie has put himself on
record as. on the whole, discounting
athletics in favor of scholarship. It
was time that somebody took this
ground, for though sport and recrea-
ton have their place, they are by no
meaps all of life.
First and foremost, they are often
overdone. The young man whose
splendid development of chest and
muscle, whose various achievements
are SO extraordinary. sometimes uses
up his physical capital too lavishly.
His heart is unequal to the strain put
on it. The strength that should have
suMced for a lifetime is drained by
the continual exertions that are Incl
dental to athletic distinction, and on
occasion it gives out. In the long run
the athlete of college days is not the
strong man of middle life, and an
athletic youth is no pledge of old age.
A sound mind in a sound body was
the ideal of the ancients. 1t is what
We most need to meet the demands
of the moderns.
A weak, sickly. effete body that can
endure no stress of weather, that is
like house. out of repair, with fall
ing chimneys and leaking roof, is to
be regarded as great misfortune.
1t is more than calamity. Always
1t is an embarrassment. Often it is
sin. In these days of advanced sci
ence, those who come into the world
with Inherited tendencies to disease
may triumph over them if they will
use the means and live by hygienic
rules. Air, exercise, food, sleep, are
the remedies Nature provides against
feebleness and frailty. Nobody should
be ill who can help it, and much can
be done to help it in most cases. We
may be VOL if we choose.
Over-exercise is as perilous as none
at all. The strongest swimmer may
abuse his skill. The swiftest runner
may run too far.
Athletics have superseded to some
extent, in some places, the respectable
and less exciting business of work
Ing around the house and door yard.
The sons of the family, lads between
Is and 20, used to do the daily chores,
NIL the tanks that called for stren-
uous pumping. drive the lawn mower,
chop the wood, groom the horses and
weed the garden. They still lend a
hand when the family finances COM
pei them to do SO, but as money is
more plentiful than once, it is less
and less the fashion for boys and
young men to be serviceable about
the home. They do not see the neces-
sity. Economy is not a popular vir-
tue. Splitting wood and attending to
furnace are not picturesque modes
of diversion or agreeable ways of
taking exercise. Our sons, and for
that matter some of our daughter,
look with shy disfavor on homely
household tasks, while they expend
energy and fervor by wholesale on
the games they care for.
Few mothers entirely approve Of
the risks their sons take in sport. To
bring your boy safely through the
reefs aud shoals of early childhood,
through mumps and measles and
chicken-pox and whocping cough, and
then have him MANNED and disfgured
in football, is heart-breaking per-
formance. The boy, carried off the
field with broken knee cap, is buoyed
up by the plaudits of his fellows, but
in the dreary days on crutches, those
plaudits will bring him little comfort.
The accidents that march in the wake
of athletics are appalling, and the
notifying reflection that they are to
be set down on the balance sheet of
life under the heading of absolute
loss must come home to most of US
in candid moments.
Yet, the question has two aspects.
Nobody wants his boy to be a mum,
q coward. Miss Betty. Every father
and every mother must prefer to have
sons who can hold their own, come
what may. The value of athletic sport
is in the training which gives cool
ness in the presence of danger, ac-
curacy Of aim, Quickness of action.
On the football field a man learns to
obey; he learns the invaluable lesson
to accept defeat without outcry. 1t is
as honorable to be good loser in the
game, when loss is inevitable, as to
be winner. The main thing anyway
IN this world is to play the game
fairly, in accordance with the rules,
without meanness, or i'll temper, or
self-seeking.
To live covering over the hearth,
when there is manful work to. be