THE POLITICS OF CYCLING.
OUTING’S mission is to entertain and instruct, to elevate and encourage legitimate outdoor sport and recreation, to the end that the manhood and womanhood of its clientèle may benefit thereby in mind and body.
Occupying this high place, and having selected this noble part as our particular field of enterprise in the world, we have always deemed it best to take little active, and positively no partisan, interest in the politics of the League of American Wheelmen. We are content to leave the exclusively cycling press in undisputed possession of that field which treats of League offices and the doings of League officials.
Sometimes, when scanning the brilliant editorials of our weekly cycling contemporaries, we have grown envious and have been sorely tempted to take a hand and out with our opinions. The legislative wisdom that bristles on our pen point, however, has been restrained by the knowledge that we appear before the wheel-world but once a month, when the question under discussion has often been disposed of by the weeklies before we go to press.
We, along with all who have the best interests of cycling at heart, have been greatly interested in the arguments, pro and con, concerning the new League constitution. As we are minded to jot down these few remarks, there lies before us copies of the Wheel and Cycle Trade Review and copies of the Bicycling World and League Bulletin. Apropos of the subject under discussion there is, to say the least, a “friendly difference of opinion” between them.
“Rings,” “wire-pullings,” “gangs,” etc., are openly talked of, and dark hints lurk between lines and words. Some of the remarks and insinuations indulged in are refreshingly frank, and yet the impression is left, that the pens of the writers have been held under restraint, so as not to reveal the depth of their inmost thoughts. It is, or appears to us to be, almost a case of “you have” and “we swear to you, by all that’s holy, we have not—so there!” not to say “you’re another!”
It is in such moments as these that OUTING takes unto itself much solid comfort in the reflection that, as a non-combatant and a mutual friend and well-wisher, it can take the non-partisan stump and out with a word or two of timely wisdom to the rank and file of the League, whilst the rival champions are fighting it out.
Whether ringsters, wire-pullers and gangs have really taken possession of the politics of the L. A. W. is a matter that every member of the organization should judge for himself from the evidence advanced. The League is not made up of children, nor of dotards, but, for the most part, of intelligent young men capable of knowing their own minds and forming their own opinions.
THOMAS STEVENS.
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