If at the outset, the group, coming together in park or vacant lot, cannot speedily agree upon a modus operandi, their energy is turned into profane disputing about the chief positions, and usually a game cannot be organized, or, if it is, lack of agreement as to put-outs, runs, fouls, and debatable points soon ruins the attempt, with little left to most of the boys except resentment of the might-makes-right policy. On the other hand, whether one has in mind a team or a chance group of players, the presence of a capable adult as an immediate and final court of appeal guarantees fair play for all, prevents personal animosities, and inspires each one to do his best in the presence of a competent judge.
Wherever the team with proper supervision is a possibility the moral value of the game will be at its maximum. Uniforms are not to be despised. Loyalty to the school represented is but boyhood's form of what in later life becomes ability to espouse a cause and to assume a degree of social responsibility in keeping with that attitude.
Because of this loyalty the boy who expected to play in the prominent position of pitcher takes his less conspicuous place in right field, if by fair trials under the trainer another boy has demonstrated his superior fitness to fill the much-coveted position. For the credit of the community or school which he has the honor to represent, the match game must be won; hence he surrenders his personal glory to the common good. He does more. Under the excitement of the contest and with the consequent strengthening of the team spirit, he encourages the very boy, who would otherwise have been only his personal rival, to do his level best, forgetting utterly any mean individual comparisons and all anti-social self-consciousness, in what he has enthusiastically accepted as the greater common good.
He goes to bat at a critical juncture in the game. The score is close. He as much as anyone would like to have runs to his credit. But for the sake of the team his chief concern must be to advance the base runner. So he plays carefully rather than spectacularly, and makes a bunt or a sacrifice hit, with the practical certainty that he will be put out at first base, but with a good probability that he will thus have advanced his fellow one base and so have contributed to the team's success.
The religious value of the principle here involved receives no little attention in sermon and Sunday-school class, but how tame and formal is its verbal presentation as compared with its registration in the very will and muscles of a boy at play! Wherever a state has become great or a cause victorious, wherever a hero--a Socrates or a Christ--has appeared among men, there has been the willingness, when necessary, to make the "sacrifice hit." The loyalty that has held itself ready so to serve on moral demand has to its credit all the higher attainments of humanity.
In the great American experiment of democracy, where the welfare of the people is so often bartered for gold, and where public office is frequently prostituted to private gain, there is a proportionately great need of teaching in every possible way this fundamental virtue of loyalty. Our future will be secure only in the degree in which intelligent and strong men are devoted to the welfare of city and state after the fashion of the boy to his team. It is because war, with all its horrors, has stimulated and exhibited this virtue that its glory persists far into our industrial age; and the hope of a lofty patriotism, that shall be equal to the enervating influences of peace, lies in an educated and self-denying type of loyalty.
The use of this loyalty in the reformation of boy criminals has been remarkably demonstrated in the well-known work of Judge Ben B. Lindsey, of Denver. In a particularly difficult case he says:
I decided to put my influence over him to the test. I told him of the fight I was making for him, showed him how I had been spending all my spare time "trying to straighten things out" for him and Heimel, and warned him that the police did not believe I could succeed. "Now, Lee," I said, "you can run away if you want to, and prove me a liar to the cops. But I want to help you and I want you to stand by me. I want you to trust me, and I want you to go back to the jail there, and let me do the best I can." He went, and he went alone--unguarded.
Here is a striking example of the team work of two with the play upon loyalty and the spirit of contest.
Another lesson about boys I learned from little "Mickey" when I was investigating his charge that the jailer had beaten him. The jailer said: "Some o' those kids broke a window in there, and when I asked Mickey who it was, he said he didn't know. Of course he knew. D'yu think I'm goin' to have kids lie to me?" A police commissioner who was present turned to Mickey. "Mickey," he said, "why did you lie?" Mickey faced us in his rags. "Say," he asked, "Do yoh t'ink a fullah ought to snitch on a kid?" And the way he asked made me ashamed of myself. Here was a quality of loyalty that we should be fostering in him instead of trying to crush out of him. It was the beginning in the boy of that feeling of responsibility to his fellows on which society is founded. Thereafter, no child brought before our court was ever urged to turn state's evidence against his partners in crime--much less rewarded for doing so or punished for refusing. Each was encouraged to "snitch" on himself, and himself only.