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parts of Ireland are today as peaceable as any shire in England. The spirit of hard work permeates all classes in the public service, from the President down.

Very notable, too, is the fidelity displayed by the Free State Government in connection with the Treaty. The Treaty has been scrupulously observed, in the letter and the spirit. If ever there was any intention to make Dominion status a mere jumping-off ground for a Republic, it has vanished. The Free State Government will keep the Treaty and will have the Irish people behind them.

The Republicans are a vanishing quantity and, but for one element, are altogether negligible. That element consists of a small number of religious fanatics, whose antagonism to the British Empire is based on strictly religious grounds. They reason that Great Britain is the home of unbelief in the Englishspeaking world; hence it must be destroyed. These fanatics are few in number, but stern of purpose. Recent events have made them quiescent for the present, but they, or their successors, will be heard of should England be again engaged in a war. But this class is losing its authority every day, and, though its existence is a danger, still I think that in no contingency will the danger be very formidable.

As I write, the Imperial Conference is sitting, and the Free State is a willing participator in its deliberations. President Cosgrave's opening speech was a model of tact and good sense. The Free State, and perhaps others of the Dominions as well, may make gestures of "coequality", but when all is said and done, the position comes to this: When Great Britain is at war, so are the Dominions, unless in that event they cut the painter altogether. From the economic point of view, it is difficult to see what the Free State can get out of the Conference. England can never shut out Danish-or any other agricultural produce for the purpose of giving a preference to Ireland's produce.

Northern Ireland and the Free State now look on each other with friendly eyes. Northern Ireland, too, has been hard hit by post-war conditions, notably in its ship building and linen industries. Nevertheless, it has managed to pay its way and something into the Imperial Exchequer as well. A fusion of

some sort between the two parts of Ireland, each preserving local controversy, may reasonably be expected, but probably not for a decade or so.

The utter dependence of Ireland upon England is a hard fact that Irishmen find it difficult to swallow, but it is a fact, nevertheless. England takes ninety per cent. of Ireland's produce. That Ireland is able to raise money at five per cent. is mainly attributable to the circumstances that she is part of the British Empire, sharing the Empire's credit, defended by the resources of the Empire without being obliged to contribute a man, a ship, or a shilling towards that defence.

Political conditions do not alter the economic unity of the two islands. Such vital factors as wages and labor conditions must always tend, in spite of any change of political status, to approximate in both islands. Remote from each other in spirit and philosophy, the islands are one from the point of view of trade, commerce and defence.

Ireland's future is a modest but, I hope, a happy one. She will remain a predominantly agricultural country, with a splendid market at her door. Any one who sees, at close range, the evils of an industrial civilization, may well congratulate her upon her lot.

COMMERCIALIZATION OF TENNIS

BY FRED HAWTHORNE

THE present unrest in amateur lawn tennis has not been a thing of sudden action. It cannot even be said that the encroachment of the professional element into the game has been unforeseen these last dozen years. Those who have been in intimate touch with lawn tennis players during that period, and who have perceived the gradual growth of the commercial spirit within a realm that was once purely and wholly amateur, cannot have failed to observe the signs that portended a change in conditions.

Turning back the pages of lawn tennis history to the days when the Newport Casino was the cradle of the American game, I am made vividly aware of this vital change that has come over the situation. In the reign of Campbell, Hovey, Wrenn, Whitman, Larned, Wright and Ward, to mention the names of some of the illustrious among our former national champions, the shadow of commercialism had not yet darkened the lawn tennis horizon. The spirit of play was still in the air; laughter and good natured badinage, even a certain carelessness and freedom from care, were outstanding characteristics among these young men who met to struggle for the highest honors of American courts. The stakes for which they played were just as high, surely, higher, I should say, if we are still to hold tradition as something beyond all price, as they are in this day of an all-conquering super-man of the courts, Tilden.

Men were not "specialists" in amateur sports fifteen and twenty years ago to the extent that they are today. There was none of that "fury and fetich" of concentration in the game that has marked it in recent years. The players who strove for championships on the classic turf of Newport had not reached, nor had they even dreamed of, that state wherein they believed it

worth their while to subordinate all else to the pursuit of lawn tennis. They played, and they played with fire and enthusiasm, with complete enjoyment and with skill; but they were not the modern tennis "machines" that we see on the courts today, faces set in grim lines and "following the circuits" eight, nine and ten months out of the twelve.

I have always been a firm believer in the English attitude toward sport. And to those who say: “All very well; but what are English athletes compared to our own? Who holds most of the world's records in athletics, who has been the champion lawn tennis nation of the world since the close of the World War? The United States!" I would answer: "Yes, all you say is true; but at what cost have we gained this ascendency? The average Britisher who is interested in sports is far more apt to be capable in half a dozen different competitive sports than his American cousin."

When it becomes a matter of who is going to gain the highest honors in any one sport, it is a fairly safe wager that an American will be found at the top, or close to that position. Making up his mind, in early youth, to become a tennis champion, or a running champion, or a jumping champion, he proceeds to concentrate on that one thing to the practical exclusion of all else. If it should happen to be lawn tennis upon which he sets his mind, then nothing else must be allowed to interfere. Golf is not for him, nor football, nor any one of the various forms of athletics. Having dedicated himself to tennis, he devotes hours to the practicing of certain strokes, and other hours to the study of other players. Admirable, in the light of his avowed purpose. But it is the wisdom of his purpose that I question.

Peering back into the past, I see the Herculean figure of "Tony" Wilding, the great Australian, the magnificent blond giant who four times in the years just preceding the World War won the world's singles championship title at Wimbledon and who, in the early period of the conflict, gave up his life on the battlefield at Gallipoli. Wilding played on the victorious Australian Davis Cup of 1914 at Forest Hills, but long before that he was known as a Rugby football player of international calibre, as an expert driver of racing automobiles, as a capable flier

even in those early days of aviation, in addition to his reputation as a splendid cricket player and swimmer. It so happened that Wilding was extraordinarily gifted as a tennis player, and that he gained a place among the immortals by his prowess with a racquet. But tennis was not his life, his supreme goal. He could look forward with equanimity to the time when he would pass from the front rank of its players; yet there is no doubt but that he would have continued to play the game (had his life been spared) until a ripe old age, and played tennis of a quality that would have kept him up among the high ranking players of the world for years after he had stepped down from the supreme heights. But he accepted lawn tennis almost as incidental among the sports in which he delighted. The mere fact that he would no longer be tennis champion would leave no void in his life. He played "for the game's sake", nothing else.

Great Britain has not a monopoly of men such as Wilding, who indulge in sports for no other reason than the enjoyment they get out of whatever it is in which they compete. Robert Lindley Murray was one striking example of this, and Richard Norris Williams, 2nd, captain of this year's Davis Cup team, is another. No finer sportsmen ever lived than these two, and there have been few greater players; yet neither ever permitted the game they love to assume a disproportionate influence in his life.

Straying afield for a moment or two, in order to bring up another illustration of the saner attitude Englishmen hold toward their sports, I recall, upon the arrival of a team of Oxford and Cambridge University track athletes in this country to compete in the Penn relay games, how surprised were our men when they observed how lightly the visitors regarded their training and their diet, in comparison with the rigid schedule laid down for the Americans. These young sons of Great Britain laughed, and chaffed, and smoked, and ate about what they pleased, on the eve of the games, and they did not "punish" themselves in going through their training exercises. Yet, if memory serves me correctly, they made an astonishingly good showing and broke a world's record or two. Neither before, during or after the international track and field meet did they appear over

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