The difficulty is therefore that the actual raising of the standard of athletics has probably been bad for national athleticism.  Instead of the tournament being a healthy melee into which any ordinary man would rush and take his chance, it has become a fenced and guarded tilting-yard for the collision of particular champions against whom no ordinary man would pit himself or even be permitted to pit himself.  If Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields it was because Eton cricket was probably much more careless then than it is now.  As long as the game was a game, everybody wanted to join in it.  When it becomes an art, every one wants to look at it.  When it was frivolous it may have won Waterloo:  when it was serious and efficient it lost Magersfontein.

In the Waterloo period there was a general rough-and-tumble athleticism among average Englishmen.  It cannot be re-created by cricket, or by conscription, or by any artificial means.  It was a thing of the soul.  It came out of laughter, religion, and the spirit of the place.  But it was like the modern French duel in this—­that it might happen to anybody.  If I were a French journalist it might really happen that Monsieur Clemenceau might challenge me to meet him with pistols.  But I do not think that it is at all likely that Mr. C. B. Fry will ever challenge me to meet him with cricket-bats.

AN ESSAY ON TWO CITIES.

A little while ago I fell out of England into the town of Paris.  If a man fell out of the moon into the town of Paris he would know that it was the capital of a great nation.  If, however, he fell (perhaps off some other side of the moon) so as to hit the city of London, he would not know so well that it was the capital of a great nation; at any rate, he would not know that the nation was so great as it is.  This would be so even on the assumption that the man from the moon could not read our alphabet, as presumably he could not, unless elementary education in that planet has gone to rather unsuspected lengths.  But it is true that a great part of the distinctive quality which separates Paris from London may be even seen in the names.  Real democrats always insist that England is an aristocratic country.  Real aristocrats always insist (for some mysterious reason) that it is a democratic country.  But if any one has any real doubt about the matter let him consider simply the names of the streets.  Nearly all the streets out of the Strand, for instance, are named after the first name, second name, third name, fourth, fifth, and sixth names of some particular noble family; after their relations, connections, or places of residence—­Arundel Street, Norfolk Street, Villiers Street, Bedford Street, Southampton Street, and any number of others.  The names are varied, so as to introduce the same family under all sorts of different surnames.  Thus we have Arundel Street and also Norfolk Street; thus