Besides this there is always the development of that good-natured appreciation of every hard task, that refinement of the true sporting spirit, by which all the serious work of life becomes a contest worthy of never-ending interest and buoyant persistency.  In the midst of all the sublime responsibilities of his remarkable ministry we hear Phillips Brooks exclaim, “It’s great fun to be a minister.”  An epoch-making president of the United States telegraphs his colleague and successor, with all the zest of a boy at play, “We’ve beaten them to a frazzle”; and the greatest of all apostles, triumphing over bonds and imprisonment, calls out to his followers, “I have fought a good fight.”  “It is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it.”

The saving power of organized play, in the prevention and cure of that morbidity which especially besets youth, can hardly be overestimated.  This diseased self-consciousness is intimately connected with nervous tensions and reflexes from sex conditions and not infrequently passes over into sex abuse or excess of some sort.  So that the diversion of strenuous athletic games, and the consequent use of energy up to a point just below exhaustion, is everywhere recognized as an indispensable moral prophylactic.  Solitariness, overwrought nervous states, the intense and suggestive stimuli of city life, call for a large measure of this wholesome treatment for the preservation of the moral integrity of the boy, his proper self-respect, and those ideals of physical development which will surely make all forms of self-abuse or indulgence far less likely.

The normal exhilaration of athletic games, which cannot be described to those without experience, is often what is blindly and injuriously sought by the young cigarette smoker in the realm of nervous excitation without the proper motor accompaniments.  Possibly if we had not so restricted our school-yards and overlooked the necessity for a physical trainer and organized play, we would not have schools in which as many as 80 per cent of the boys between ten and seventeen years of age are addicted to cigarettes.  In trying to fool Nature in this way the boy pays a heavy penalty in the loss of that very decisiveness, force, and ability in mind and body which properly accompany athletic recreation.  The increased circulation and oxidization of the blood is in itself a great tonic and when one reflects that, with a running pace of six miles an hour the inhalation of air increases from four hundred and eighty cubic inches per minute to three thousand three hundred and sixty cubic inches, the tonic effect of the athletic game will be better appreciated.  This increased use of oxygen means healthy stimulation, growth of lung capacity, and exaltation of spirit without enervation.  “Health comes in through the muscles but flies out through the nerves.”