Fifty years of athletics

FOREWORD
(
N
writing the foreword to
Fifty Years of Amateur
Athletics in Scotland, I
am conscious of the value of
the work both as a record of past endeavour and as a guide
to future policy.
Our first introduction to athletics is generally gained
at school, and it is interesting to remark the extraordinary
progress that has been made in cultivating that fertile
ground since the inception of the Scottish Amateur Athletic
Association in 1883. At the present moment organised
games and sports are as much an accepted feature of
school curriculum as are arithmetic or history, and are
generally admitted to be of equal importance.
There are those who consider that undue stress is laid
upon the physical side of scholastic life, but for myself I
cannot admit it. The average boy is full of a superabund-
ance of energy which must find an outlet. If that energy
be directed into a proper channel, it can be made a vital
factor in the building of the boy's character. If it be not
so directed, it will find an egress in ways altogether un-
desirable. The Victorians visualised high spirits as a
waste product, which must be eliminated by disciplined
suppression. Our modern view teaches that boyish energy
is a by-product of infinite value which can be used with
results altogether beneficial, and that games and athletics
supply that anchor-hold, that definite background, during
the critical peilod of adolescence, without which the
majority of us world give Satan a congenial task in finding
" mischief still for idle hands to do."
It is difficult to realise the extent to which sport in its
many branches has influenced the character of the British
nation. They have given to us, in my view, a balanced
judgment, a complete immunity to panic, and a good-
humoured tolerance which must surely be the despair of
the agitator and revolutionary.
I hold that at the moment Great Britain is the only
country where a natural democracy exists. Democracy
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