COMMENT

Eastern institutions mindful of their own past will not indulge a sense of superior virtue in contemplating the outbreak of professionalism in Middle Western colleges. New times, new temptations! If ever Putnam, Conn., vied with Worcester, Mass., at professional football, putting $100,000 to the touch and hoping to win by dint of star players imported from Yale and Harvard respectively, the fact is nowhere recorded. But this is the sort of thing that took place between Carlinville and Taylorville, lining the pockets of players from Notre Dame and the University of Illinois. Yet still there is no occasion for the attitude pharisaical. No one can be quite sure what would have happened if professional football had flourished among the cities of the seaboard, rousing instincts of civic pride and personal gain. Nor have the temptations of the Middle West been sordid merely. There is that matter of stadiums. No college which is truly up and doing can be quite satisfied with the athletic glory that was Greece until it is appropriately encompassed by the architectural grandeur that was Rome. And how is the drive for funds to prosper unless the driver can point with pride to teams whose victories on the embattled field are worthy of an architectural setting? So long as Carlinvilles think to gain pride and pelf by putting one over on the rival Taylorvilles and the Taylorvilles copper the game; so long as stadiums are passionately desired and graduates susceptible only to the appeal pragmatical--just so long will the Middle West endure temptations unknown to the effete East.

The real evil of professionalism is not that certain laborers receive their hire: it is that they take the place of the true amateur. Where the imported athlete flourishes, local talent withers. Each myrmidon deprives dozens of good men of the incentive to training. When the true amateur spirit prevails, a college centers its pride not merely in the prowess of its teams, but also in the gross number of its students who learn to love sport for the sake of sport and of the health in body and in mind which it engenders. No institution is secure in virtue until the amateur spirit pervades the undergraduate body. New York Times.