INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
All games, pastimes, and sports worthy of the name are artificial work. What our ancestors did because they must to live, we do because we find that vigorous use of our powers, physical, mental, and moral, makes living more agreeable.
They rode and shot and fished, walked, ran, carried heavy weights, chopped down trees, paddled canoes, sailed boats, fought wild beasts, hunted game for food, and drove oxen, mules, and horses because they had to do these things to live.
We do many of these same things. We chop down trees, paddle canoes, sail boats, run, jump, struggle against one another with the gloves or at football, swim, play golf and tennis, ride and drive, but we call it sport! In reality it is artificial work.
Because the environment has changed, and we are no longer forced to do these things for a living and to live at all, we now do them to make our own living more wholesome and agreeable, and call these pursuits sports.
Either because human life originally was safest to those who were most formidable at work and at war, or because we are so constituted that we cannot live without exercise, we still continue the physical exertions of our forebears under the name of sport.