But there is of course another side to the development of Oxford
athletics. Perhaps the most important point is that play is the
greatest social leveller. It is easy to attend the same lectures as a
man, and even to sit at the same table with him in hall, and not to
know him well, because his clothes and his accent are not quite
correct. But in these days when so many games are played, and when
competition is so keen, any man who can do anything gets his chance;
and many are the instances every year of men who would never have
made friends in their colleges outside a small circle, had not their
quickness as half-backs, or their ability as slow bowlers, brought
their contemporaries to recognize their merits. You cannot play with
a man without knowing him, and young Oxford is democratic at heart,
and when once it knows a man, it does not trouble about the non-
essentials of wealth and fashion.
And again, though it may seem a paradox to say it, the amount of play
in Oxford has increased the amount of work. Organized games mean
physical fitness, and physical fitness means ability to get
intellectual work done. Perhaps it may be argued that the absorption
in athletics deadens all intellectual life, and that many Oxford men
read only and discuss only the sporting news in the papers; this no
doubt has a strange fascination, even for men who do not play; one of
the most distinguished of Oxford statesmen of the last generation,
himself so blind that he could not hit a ball, confessed to me that
he always, in the summer, read the cricket news in /The Times/ before
he read anything else.
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