It requires no experience in prophecy to predict that the future history of the football with which our schoolboy, collegian, and grandstand enthusiast are familiar is to be as American as its past. Temperament, climatic conditions and other factors operate to insure a steady progress along lines wide apart from English, Canadian or Australian. It has been so in the case of almost every game requiring physical contact played in the United States. There are those who will point to the Association, or "Soccer" game as an exception, but it would not surprise me if in the not too distant future certain departures would be made from the English style of play, a style, by the way, with which we have become familiar slowly. In its recent form in this country the Association game will never take the place of American Rugby, which is nearer and dearer to the hearts of the best type of American college athlete and his friends and followers than any other game could ever be.

The beginnings of football were much alike on both sides the ocean, but while the Englishmen built up tradition, and worked out a game suited to the maximum of team, or as they call it in England, "combination" play, consistent with extreme individualism, the restless Americans con-1 tinued their experimentation in the hope of eventually establishing a sport that while governned by certain rules, would be one of limitless possibilities - a game of personal sacrifice of the highest order extending over a brief period, of team play and of progress. The restless, inventive, American temperament could not well stop short of this. The result has been that while the British Isles have - with rare periods of innovation and unrest - a settled game, the United States has an ever-changing one - a game that makes its tactical and strategical appeal to the humblest member of every eleven.

There breathes no player with the inventive faculty so smothered that he does not at some period of his gridiron career aspire to be a field general, to originate the plays, the tactics and the strategy that are to bring victory to his team.

This inventive tendency is encouraged in the American game, discouraged in the English. I do not think that the great mass of American football players will ever, through their legislative representatives, pass on to the officials who handle the games the supreme authority that is vested in an English referee. They will not allow invention and progress to be choked at the outset, but will be content, when such invention becomes a menace to the health of the sport, with making such rules as will discourage further progress along lines proved to be dangerous, thus turning the progressives into other channels. This was what happened after the season of 1911, when it was generally admitted that progress in the attack had been checked to such a degree that monotony was threatened. Radical re-arrangement of the rules was undertaken in the hope that the progressive tacticians and strategists might resume their onward march and so restore to the game much of the brilliance that had been dimmed by a too severe restriction of the attack.

Just as in previous years there were many who believed that the Rules Committee had gone too far, but it was felt that such evils as might creep into the game might be remedied in succeeding seasons as players and coaches developed in freer play, in individual skill and in generalship. So it is that the American game is always on trial with the players and the public, and so it is that the restlessness of the American temperament keeps football thoroughly alive, and thoroughly representative of the changing point of view of its followers.

In England it is quite another matter. The game serves an athlete from boyhood, through school and college, and thereafter. The Englishman wants a game that he can play through the thirties, and much at his own convenience, calling for the least possible amount of personal sacrifice, even though this restriction prevents the university fifteens from reaching that height of efficiency in combination attained by the best American university elevens. The busy American demands a game that can be played to the maximum of his powers and self-sacrifice while in school and college, being quite willing thereafter to turn to other sports for his fun and exercise. The Englishman wants to keep up his football, while the American does not. The latter would rather return to see his successors develop the game beyond the stage at which he was a star, to counsel and advise, to give his brain to this advanced development, and to continue as tactician and strategist the work he left behind him as a player. The fascination is still there, but he realizes that under the new order of things he cannot hope in his own person to cope with the younger element.

Racquets, tennis, handball, golf and other sports built on individualism provide him with all that is necessary in the way of exercise and competitive fun, and I do not believe he would come out and play football even if the rules were so arranged as to fit the game to a man past his thirtieth year. The real health of American football lies in our schools and universities, while the saving grace of English football is to be found in the great clubs, like Blackheath and the Harlequins, and the international fifteens of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, combinations that no university team could hope to meet with anything like an equal chance for victory.

Englishmen have the game they want, while we have, in the main, the game we want; the English game is built around a Plan, and woe betide him who takes too many liberties with it, while the American game is a mass of plana and stratagems. There are, of course, basic principles, as will be shown in these pages, but they are not the principles of immutable rule and of tradition, but rather the principles that grow out of the sum of many experiences.