CHAPTER I.
Prefatory Remarks.—Fig—Sutton—Whitaker—Peartree—Pipes—Gretting.
We have collected in our Introductory Chapter the few scattered notices of pugilism as practised and understood by the earlier Celtic nations. Despite, however, the proclivity of antiquaries, historians, and scholars to find a Roman or Greek origin for every manner, custom, and tradition—as if we had none originally of our own,—we may safely say that Boxing, in the noble manly forbearing and humane practice of the art, is the indigenous offspring of British hardihood, steady courage, and love of gymnic exercise and feats of bodily strength and skill, not unaccompanied with that amount of risk and severe exertion which lend a zest to sports unappreciated and unknown to more effeminate, more cruel, and more cowardly peoples. Let not this be taken as the hasty expression of insular prejudice. The writer, after deeply considering, and often witnessing, the personal contests of men in his own country and abroad, and dispassionately weighing the manner, accessories, and consequences of such contests, feels it a duty he owes to a half-informed and prejudiced society to express the result of his experience and his reflection, without fear, favour, or affection:—fear of the onslaughts of spiritual and moral quacks; favour for those who have degraded or debased a useful and laudable national exercise and sport; or affection, more than is due to an art which he would fain rescue from the obloquy and condemnation to which blind hostility and canting prejudice have consigned it. He would fain uphold that pugilistic combat which a fair field, no favour, and surrender at all times at the will of either party, distinguishes from every mode of conflict yet devised or practised for the settlement of those “offences” which the highest authority has told us “needs must come.” At a period within the earlier memories of the writer, a school of babblers flooded the press with theories of the perfectibility of man, the ultimate establishment of universal freedom, and the sublimation of the human faculties by general education and popular science; and a period was confidently predicted by these theorising shallowpates, when war would be an “impossibility” as against the “interests” of men and nations. We have lived to see the most sanguinary and ferocious contest in history among the people whom these sciolists set up as the bright example to the “less educated” nations of the Old World. We may, therefore, safely despise the “new light” philosophy, and revert to the eternal truth already cited—“needs must be that offences will come;” and this necessity being inevitable, the next logical step is to consider how these “offences” may be best dealt with and atoned.
So long as man is liable to the imperfections of his nature he will need the art of defending himself from attack and injury, and of redressing wrong or insult that may be offered him. All experience has taught us that the passions of pride and emulation (honourable like every human attribute within limits), and resentment for injury, are the springs of some of our noblest actions. It is to the stifling and too severe repression of the active energies of a resolute and independent spirit that the soul of man as an individual, and of a nation as a whole, sinks into the vengeful cowardice and cruel pusillanimity of the abject yet ferocious slave. As, then, a greater or less portion of evil must be attached to the best system of popular moral or civil restraint, the wisest policy is that which legislates for man as we find him, and not as the perfect or perfectible (?) creature which theorists and bigots pretend that he ought to be.
At the risk of repetition we will return to our argument. Individuals, as well as states, must have their disputes, their quarrels, and then—their battles. This is, there is no denying, the sad but natural—the regrettable but inevitable, condition and tenure on which human life—nay, all animal existence—is held. There must, then, be some mode through which the passions, when aroused, from whatever cause,—
Ambition, love, or greed and thirst of gold,—
may be assuaged, subdued, or extinguished; when the necessity for an appeal to the ultima ratio of conflict is unavoidable. And surely, in this extremity the fists—the symbol of personal courage, of prompt readiness for defence and attack—are the most harmless, the ever-present, and the least fatal weapons. We will leave, gentle or simple reader, the pistol to your higher-born countrymen of the “upper ten thousand,” if it so please them; the fatal fleuret to the fire-eating Gaul (whether soldier, litterateur, or “pekin”); the back-handed stiletto to the stabbing Italian; the sharp, triangular rapier or the dagger to the saturnine Spaniard; the slaughterous schlager to the beer-bemused burschen[[7]] of dreamy Vaterland; the gash-inflicting knife to the Dutch boor or seaman’s snicker-snee; the death-dealing “bowie,” “Kansas toothpick,” and murderous “six-shooter” to the catawampous citizen of the “univarsal Yankee nation;” the waved kreese, to the muck-running Malay; each tawny savage to his sharp tomahawk, his poisoned arrow, or his barbed assagai; and then we would ask the scribblers of the anti-pugilistic press which of these they are prepared to champion against the fist of the British boxer,—a weapon of defence which, as exemplified in the practice laid down in the latest code of Ring Law, is the perfection of the practice of cool courage, self-reticent combat, restraint, skill, and endurance that can illustrate and adorn the character of an unsophisticated and true-hearted Englishman in the supreme moment of conquest or of defeat.
It has frequently been urged by magistrates, and even ermined judges[[8]] of quasi-liberal sentiments, that pugilism, as a national practice, and an occasional or fortuitous occurrence, may be winked at by the authorities, or tacitly allowed, and prohibited or punished at discretion, as the occasion may seem to require: but that gymnastic schools where boxing is regularly taught, and pitched battles, are social nuisances which the law should rigorously suppress. Granting the possibility of this utter repression, which we deny, it may well be questioned whether we have not tried to suppress a lesser evil to evolve a greater.[[9]]
To boxing-schools and regulated combats we owe that noble system of fistic ethics, of fair play, which distinguishes and elevates our common people, and which stern, impartial, unprejudiced and logical minds must hail and foster as one of the proud attributes of our national character. We do not in the least undervalue peaceful pursuits, which constitute and uphold the blessings of peaceful life; yet a nation with no idea or principle beyond commerce would be unworthy, nay, would be impotent for national existence, much more for national power and progress. Subjection, conquest, and hence serfdom and poverty, must be its fate in presence of strong, rapacious, and encroaching neighbours. “The people that possesses steel,” said the ancient assailant of the Lydian Crœsus, “needs not long want for gold.” A portion, then, of a nation must be set apart, whose vocation it will be to secure and to defend the lives, liberties, and properties of the whole. Hence the honourable calling of the soldier and the sailor; and hence, to fit the people for these, and to prevent the too general indulgence of effeminacy, dread of enterprise, and the contagious spread of an enervating and fanatical peace-at-any-price quietism, it is wise and politic to encourage the manly and athletic sports and contests which invigorate the frame, brace the nerves, inspire contempt of personal suffering, and enable man to defend his rights as well as to enjoy them. Englishmen have learned, and we sincerely hope will continue to learn and to practise, fair boxing, as they have learned other arts of defence,—the use of the rifle among others, in which (as their sires of old did with the yeoman’s bow) they have already excelled Swiss, American, and Australian mountaineers and woodmen: men from countries celebrated for their practice of long shots, and constant handling of the weapon. Let them, therefore, see that the fair use of the fist is not sneered down by the craven or the canter. Were every pugilistic school shut up, the practice of boxing discouraged, and the fiat of our modern intolerant saints carried out, the manly spirit of fair play in our combats would disappear, and the people of this country lose one of their fairest characteristics. A retrospect of the last ten years will answer whether these are times to incur such risk; while at home, how-much-soever we may have had of the fist, we have indeed had too much of the loaded bludgeon, the mis-named “life-preserver,” the garotte, the knife, and the revolver.
Pugilistic exhibitions are falsely said to harden the heart, to induce ferocity of character, and that they are generally attended by the dregs of society. The last aspersion, for reasons that lie on the surface, has the most truth in it. The principle only, indeed the utility and necessity of the practice of boxing, is all we here propose to vindicate. Pugilism includes nothing essentially vicious; nothing, in itself, prompting to excess or debauchery. On the contrary, it asks temperance, exercise, and self-denial. If we are to argue and decide from the abuse of a custom or institution, where are we to stop? Men are not to be cured, even of errors, by the mere arbitrary force of laws, or by a cherished pursuit being vilified and contemned, mostly by those who are ignorant or averse to it. Teach men to respect themselves—this is the first step to make them respect others. Let this rule be applied to the Ring; let it be viewed as a popular institution; it may then, and we have warrant from experience, and in the history contained in these pages, become worthy of support and patronage. A series of biographies, which include the names of Cribb, Jackson, Gully, Shaw, Spring, Sayers, etc. (within the memory of men yet living) may be pointed to without a blush; while individual traits of heroism, generosity, forbearance, and humanity, will be found scattered as bright redeeming points through the lives of many of the “rough diamonds” preserved in the “setting” of our pages. We doubt not, were the character of the Ring raised, that successors of as good repute as these worthies would yet be found and arise among the brotherhood of the fist. Should this “consummation devoutly to be wished” ever be realised, our gymnasia, a public necessity, might then be licensed,—a security for their visitors, and adding respectability to their proprietors; for every government possesses the power of making expedient regulations, in the interest of society, even where it may not have the right to absolutely suppress or interdict. If free trade, and unrestricted leave to carry on profession or calling are such fundamental principles with our state economists, why not free boxing? and why not leave the morale of pugilism, as well as the morality of its professors, to find its level in the neglect or the patronage, the esteem or the contempt, of the people at large? Boxing and boxing schools, as free Britons, we must have. Let us, then, consider, how they can be best made to serve the cause of regulated pugilism. On the whole, there is no reason to doubt the practicability, as well as the desirability, of public boxing-schools as a branch of a system of national gymnastics. It is absurd as well as scandalous to assert that they must, ex necessitate, be the resort of profligates and thieves. As to the last named scourges of society, long observation and experience[[10]] have convinced us that we have our metropolitan and even rural nurseries for them; our “sin and crime gardens” for their special propagation, rearing, and multiplication; and we can conscientiously say, from an equally long observation, that among those thieves’ nurseries and “sin-gardens” the much-vilified Prize Ring has no special claim to be counted.