IDEALISM IN SPORT.

Dean Briggs' annual report on athletics is something more than a mere report. It is always constructive, picking out evils and suggesting ways to eradicate them; its arguments are always for higher ideals, and cleaner spirit.

The report for the past year explains two important changes in athletic government. One is an agreement between Harvard, Yale, and Princeton excluding coaches from the field when one of the teams named meets another. The second ruling concerns the writing of newspaper articles, signed and unsigned, by athletes. In both of the changes which he describes, Dean Briggs has been absolutely correct in theory; but in both he has met with opposition in practice from those undergraduates particularly interested. Yet once the new rules, which may gall a little now simply because they are new, have become firmly established through a few years of trial, the objections to them will never be remembered.

The undergraduate is a little inclined to be a hasty sportsman rather than a sport-loving sportsman,--to win first and consider the means afterwards. It is not any warp in his moral nature which makes him so, but rather a somewhat thoughtless impetuosity bred of what is known as "college spirit." A few call Dean Briggs an idealist, and mean it as a criticism, never considering that a little idealism is what college athletics need above all else. Dean Briggs is an idealist, and as such his attitude toward sport in general acts as a corrective of undergraduate impetuosity. As Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences he is remembered by many a graduate for his broad and sympathetic understanding of the student's point of view; as chairman of the Athletic Committee, his grasp of the sportsman's point of view is no less broad and no less sympathetic.