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98
DECADENT SPORT.
THE HONGKONG WEEKLY PRESS AND but there is still school and village cricket | and football, keenly played, and working its good effect on the stamina of the race. The good effects where, as recently, a crowd riotously stormed the pitch over a captain's decision to draw stumps, are less easy to recognise, although Prince RANJITSINJHI | in his book did speak of the sympathy and kindly feelings promoted among the spect- Το get back, however. to the question of lost championships, how can it prove that the English youth is too lazy to row, and row well, because a few Belgians carry away a trophy from Henley? Or that hot lawn tennis games are no longer played on English lawns because Miss MAY SUTTON, an American lady, scored most points at Wimbledon? Such champions | require more than skill; they require as- surance, leisure, and means to take up such conspicuous positions, and there must be dozens of English girls who could beat Miss SUTTON, who will never dream of coming forward as international contestants. The same argument applies to all the other Mr. MASSEY of France wins the golf championship, but surely it cannot be maintained therefore that British golf has become inferior to French golf. A Russian marine administered a thrashing to a Japa- nese soshi in a Yokohama tavera just before the war, but that isolated incident was not prophetic of the result of the international It seems to us struggle that followed. nonsense to say, as the Daily Telegraph has said, that " Englaud, after importing her knowledge to those abroad, is hoist with her own petard, and now has to s'and quietly by whilst English championships one by one leave their native shores, soine for the first time." It is to be hoped Punch will
(Daily Press, Augnst 10th.) A studious undergraduate, on hearing that his University had lost the boat race, remarked philosophically, Ah, well, no matter; we won the chess!" We are accustomed to a good deal of this kind of philosophy in connection with sport. It has become a football aphorism that the betterators. team lost (though footballers, scorners of grammar, usually say 'best' for 'better' and in waterpolo it is not unusual to impugn the honesty of the referee. Such philosophy is not good sport, but neither is the lachrymose wail of the Daily Telegraph, which, noting that the Golf Championship has gone to France, Tennis to America, Lawn tennis to Australia and America, Rowing to Belgium, Yachting to Germany and America, Pole jumping to Sweden, and Swimming to America and Australia, forthwith laments the decadence of the British youth. Pot- hunting is not good sport, and pot-winning is not a proof of any monopoly of excellence.
cases. a god horse, as every- A good second is body knows, and we are yet a long way from the stage at which it will be permiss. ible to assert that "even in their chosen pastimes the English youth are beyoud a fair second-class level. They are 100 slack to take pair s--they have not the energy--and more and more every year they are being beaten by the foreiguer." The list of foreigners who have this year scored in open events is certainly au imposing one, but it is sheer fudge to weep about it. Certainly the newspapers should be the last to lead such lamentations, for they have done their best, or worst, by the ludicrous lengths to which they have pandered to the spectators at the expense of the players, to debauch English sport. They have conspired to put it on a level with the shows and Bntertainments of the decadent Roman erena, and encouraged the youthful masses 098 8ake their let vicariously. The free public reading rooms have been the playing fields for these, because there they could get the tips and items and paragraphs which enable them to shine as critical conversationalists on the grandstand or round the ropes. But for the assistance of the press, sport could not have been commercialized as it has been, and it is by A NOTABLE HONGKONG CRIME. no means a rash assertion to say that the first gate money taken at an athletic contest was as much tainted as the silver pieces of Judas. In a single generation it has brought us to the pitch at which good cricketers write bad comments for the
Daily Mail. True artists are not supposed to discuss art, according to RUSKIN, a naive admission which delighted those who suspected Ruskin's qualification, but nowa- days a begoggled automobilist about to try to lower a track record is permitted, nay invited, to record his anticipatory sensations in a column of type, and the public swallows it. The business man who talks shop" is often one of the best business men, but the mere prater of athletics is rarely a performer. A shilling book on some sport, a halfpenny paper on current erformances, and a sixpence paid at a turnstile to cheer selected champions represents the expenditure of far too many modern sportsmen, but it is not right to nominate these as the sole representative of English adolescence. There are thousands of novices, amateurs and "
crocks" always doing their best, away from the roars of the grandstand or the fulsome adjectives and adverbs of the sporting reporter. Fashiona le cricket has been well defined as "twen y-two gladiat rs in a ring of twenty two thousand loafers,"
not overlook that historical Jeremiad.
The vision of England standing “quietly by" after being hoist on a petard is too funny. We might almost argue on Daily Telegraph lines, and submit that because that matronly organ perpetrates a howler occasionally, London journalism has gone to the dogs. Our contemporary puts the question, "Are we deteriorating physi- cally?" We r gret that our answer must be, "No. Only mentally."
(Daily Press, 12th August.)
The revolting crime now agitating the minds of all our renders promises to mark an epoch, as a famous Yokohama one did ten years ago. It does not present quite as many mysteries as the Carew case did, but it has characteristics not entirely dissimilar, inasmuch as the murderer seems to have exercised a similarly mistaken ingenuity to mislead bis inevitable pursuers. In the Carew case, anonymous letters were writ- ten to divert the hue and cry; in the pre- >ent instance the man has endeavoured to
we may call the "
|
entangle it amid a multiplicity of steamers. In both cases there are symptoms of what penny dreadful" mind, and the same extraordinary inattention to matters bound to defeat the object of the rest of the scheming. It must be a source of consolation to the public that in the ma- jority of such cases, criminal ingenuity generally suffers from flaws that lead to its lock Holmes" is a myth; gossips grumble detection. In the detective world, "Sher-
occasionally at the alleged inefficiency of the police, but the most unreasonable of them does not expect that the miracles of Conan Doyle's imagination should be reproduced in real life. It is therefore fortunate for the official guardians of public safety that "Professor Moriarty" is an equally rare
[August 19, 1907. : bird. The smartest of criminals will make the inost stupid of blunders. The murderer who could conceive of the plan of getting his victim entombed in the depths of the hold of an oceangoing steamer was cunning, but not shrewd enough to reckon on the conse- quences of a possible miscarriage of his plao. Otherwise he would have used for packing the grisly evidence of his brutality something other than towels into which was woven in staring characters the name of the hotel at which he and his victim had been staying. As to his temperament, the liveliest curiosity is unavoidable. It must have required a devilish sort of temper to kill a woman by strangling, with the deliberation evinced in the use of a bairbrush as a tourniquet. The sub-equent robbery, again, even if it were not the sole motive of the crime, puts the wickedness of it all on a lower, meaner, scale; and though the man has to be tried before he is condemned, (and caught before he is tried), we do not anticipate in this case any sentimental issues being raised, of brainstorms, or any specious defences of that sort. Whoever slew the unfortunate womau under circumstances of such almost in- conceivable malignity Las well earned the unanimous execration of the populace, and the police now in search of him have the strongest possible public good wishes for their success. It is a little unfortunate that so much well meant assistance should have proved an embarrassment rather than a help, but though the opportunities of getting away from Hongkong are so numerous and complex, the police do not despair of even- tually laying hands on the miscreant. The publicity already given to the description of a suspect must have made his progress less easy than it has hitherto been.
SHIPPING RINGS
(Daily Press, 13th August)
Has the Hongkong Chamber of Commerce been usked by the Colonial Office to answer replies regarding Shipping Couferences or
1.
Rings" similar to those just answered by the Singapore Chamber of Commerce? The replies of the Singapore Chamber, with comments of individual members, were reproduced in our issue of yester lay, and we understand, have been read with very considerable interest in Hongkong, so that the query with which these remarks begin is being made. If the local Chamber of Coma erce has not had its opinion solicited, why is it; or if it has (and it was under- stood that similar questions were to be submitted to it), when are we to have the result of its deliberations on this important subject: Such was the attitude taken up over yesterday's breakfast and tiffin tables, and as the result of enquiry, we have to give the not very satisfactory answer that the Hongkong Chamber of Commerce bas 80 far not received any such enquiries. This seems a little odd, for it cannot be supposed that the port of Hongkong is less interested in such a discussion than is its Malayan neighbour. Its opinions ought to be very interesting, moreover, with the represen- tative of the premier line presiding over its committee. However, for the present, Hongkong readers must be content with the light thrown upon the subject by the shippers of Singapore, in addition to the
from abstracts of evidence we have been giving
the published reports of the Conference DOW sitting. It will have been noticed that while the reporting members of the Singe Chamber eemed to share a unanimous antipathy to the principle and rebate practices of ship- ping combinations, the majority admitted that such "rings" had been productive of
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