GIVE THE BATSMAN A CHANCE.

During the recent convention of representatives from Harvard, Yale and other colleges to consider the subject of athletics, one of the speakers unbosomed himself thus: "Athletics have come to the pass where they are no longer fair and open trials of strength and skill, but on the contrary, as at present conducted, they train the young men to look upon victory as the rewards of treachery and deceit. That this is the case, anyone who has seen the game of baseball as it is played by the so-called best college nines will at once admit. For the pitcher, instead of delivering the ball to the batter in an honest, straightforward way, that the latter may exert his strength to the best advantage in knocking it, now uses every effort to deceive him by curving-I think that is the word-the ball. And this is looked upon as the last triumph of athletic science and skill. I tell you it is time to call halt! when the boasted progress in athletics is in the direction of fraud and deceit." Probably the annals of debate among intelligent men will show nothing richer or fresher than this. Brothers Nichols of Harvard and Moffat of Princeton will hereafter kindly refrain from practising their deceptive arts upon the guileless batsmen. It is wrong to give them balls that they cannot knock into "kingdom come." It is shame to tease them by sending in curved spheres. In future, pitchers will deliver them straight at the bat so that nothing may baffle the aim of the batsman, who can thus convert his ash into a catapult, by whose means he may kill the pitcher, or anybody else on the field at will, to prove how much of an athlete he has become since he joined college. [Clipper.