SPORT AND NATIONHOOD.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1373, 26 February 1912, Page 4

SPORT AND NATIONHOOD.

. * With a proper sense of what really matters the cable agent told the world on Saturday that the Australian cricket dispute had arrived at the point of requiring the' intervention of the Government. "Mr. M'Gowbn, the Premier of New South Wales and Mr. Holjian, the Attor-ney-General, had a long interview with the six players last night. Mr. M'Gowen subsequently said he would see the Board of Control with a proposal which ho hoped would settle matters." Perhaps such a singular extension of the functions of Cabinet Ministers is possible only in Australia, although the late Mn. Seddon went some way on one occasion towards identifying the interests of New Zealand with the interests _ of Rugby football. Is the Australasian public really so badly astray in its estimates of values as would appear from the place which it gives to sport in its conception of life! 'We are afraid it is; and although the people in Great Britain know a great deal more about sport than about anything else, there is in Britain an abundance of authority, lacking in Australia to keep sport Irom becoming the deepest concern of the general public. In England the politicians do contrive to manufacture quarrels and fiscal and Irish and Imperial and foreign issues interesting enough to ensure that the newspaper reader will at anyrate glance at the Foreign Intelligence and Parliamentary Report after absorbing the sport pages. "To me," said a well-known authority on education to Sir Arthur Quimj.r Couch, as ho records in his book From a Covnish Window, "to me these athletics arc the devil." And the worse devil, he might have added, is the fact that no amount of lamentation or warning will in the least check young Australasia's absorption in cricket and football. Like many other writers Sir Arthur believes that professional cricket and football are doing for the Anglo-Saxon what the gladiatorial shows did for Rome. But perhaps this is to transpose cause and effect. The passion for sport may not be the source of a national disease, but a symptom of it. The spell of sport over the Australian public really bears heavily upon national life. It ■captures the young man just at the age when ho should be ripening for his life's purpose and so stunts as well as distracts. Moderation in anything appears to be growing increasingly difficult to our over-ma-chined civilisation—even moderation in sport. Lord Rosebery was speaking the other day at ! the annual congress of the Educational Institute in Edinburgh and he recalled to his hearers the condition of education in Scotland half a century ago. "The old system," he said, "was an education of poverty, oatmeal and the classics, and on the whole it did not turn out bad men. Now we are rearing a generation on tea and football. I sometimes wonder whether we are turning out better men than we turned out forty years ago; better men morally, better men physically, men of more self-denial, more cnorgy, more industry and more capacity for the work which the world sets before them." What gives special significance to the intervention of Mr. M'Gowen and Me. Hohmn in the cricket dispute is the fact that the New South Wales Government has nothing to gain by it. These Ministers have no prospect of making political use of the gratitude of New South Wales in the event of their ending a trouble that involves greater Australian interests than merely political ones. They are intervening simply because the trouble naturally appeals to them, the servants of public opinion, as one that threatens the destiny of the Commonwealth. And so, as patriotic men, they throw themselves with a high seriousness into the breach. Australia has a few problems to solve that would make any old country a country of grave faces. There is' the Northern Territory to be settled. There is the devising of means to make effective Die occupation by a ffw white men of a lingo and emnty con-linc-nt. There is :\ Navy to bV built and nmminrl. an Army to be created and t rained nnd J<np( rflinu'iit, TliiM'i' is n Rival piiblir debl to lif [ lilVil. Thoro is ;i rn'nblcni in irrigation, nnd another in immigration, more vast flian any other nalinn ever hnr. bad, to solve. And A'islrnlift is wiiirhiriff th? Tp?.t i matches, in the intervals of wring. 1

ing its hands over tin; position of "Clem' , Hill and praying that the Government will rescue the nation from the horrors of an internecine cricket war. From the viewpoint of patriotism Australia's attitude is "not cricket."