We have played the English game with such patience as was at our command, and found it wanting. We went through, years ago, the game that English fifteens play every year, with occasional simple variations, and in the end discarded it. The English game for the Englishmen, the American for the Americans. Even in Canada English influence was not strong enough to prevent radical progress, and the fertile-minded Welshman has done what he could, in vain for the most part, in the face of stolidity, to work out English Rugby along novel, albeit simple lines.

It may be objected that in California English Rugby has prospered. The argument will hardly hold, for the game supplanted the American style there at the command of the heads of two universities, and the students were compelled to accept such crumbs of football as were dropped from the faculty tables. Climatic conditions, too, lent themselves readily to the growth of this sporting exotic, and yet players at the University of California and at Leland Stanford Jr. University, cling to the sharp, decisive tackling that marks the American game. Through the medium of drastic measures culminating in faculty ukase, the English game has obtained a foothold in the United States, but not the boldest of its adherents will maintain, I think, that it has found a home. In the Middle West, an extremely progressive football center, and in the conservative East, I believe that the majority of players would rather give up the game altogether than return to English Rugby. It certainly could not remain English, for the same remorseless advance that took place years ago would again seize the game and re-mould it once more nearer to the heart's desire of the American schoolboy and collegian.

Our autumn fields are hard, especially trying by comparison with the great international field at Twickenham in Surrey, England, and the type of game that brings men scatheless through a hard match on these velvety English fields where great sections of turf may be rolled up like carpets, would prove a bone-breaker on the majority of our gridirons. Yet even with a much "softer" game than ours there frequently have been serious injuries, and occasionally death on the fields of the British Isles. On the score of injuries there would be no reason for a return to the parent game, and there are plenty of other reasons why it would be a distinct, step backward.

Again the temperamental. The American athlete who is not out for individual honors on track and field, who loves team play, could hardly stomach the idea that there are moments in which he, on the field, in playing togs, need have nothing to do. It is so in nearly all games in which physical contact is an element. The American player will invent something to do. It may be unorthodox, it may be against tradition and even come close to an evasion of the rules, but it will be an expression of the American spirit that will stir his team mates to greater effort, will add to the efficiency of his team, and will arouse the spectator, be he partisan or non-partisan, to a pitch of excitement, interest and appreciation not to be attained in any other way.

This quality of individual initiative, I believe, appeals to every American. It is not lightly to be east aside, but to be measured, to a certain extent harnessed, and used, in sport as in other activities of later life. The American game gives every player something to do all the time, permitting him at the same time to add such excess efficiency as lies within his power. What one man has done well of his own initiative, becomes in time what all men should do, and the coaches of the big elevens constantly raise the standard, until, taking the sum of the initiative of many men, they set before us their conception of the ideal player. This is a feature not to be found in English Rugby. Indeed, so rare is initiative in that game, that a tablet at Rugby school records the sensational feat of William Webb Ellis, who founded the running game, in picking up the ball and running with it, a performance alike against rule and tradition.

Succeeding innovators in England have not fared so well. Given a man of ideas in English Rugby, and at the first outcropping of individual or team novelty there is a hurried meeting of the referees and it is decided that the play is against the law. There is nothing the matter with it save that it must not be done. There has been in recent years in the English game a maneuver known as the "loose head," a maneuver comparable in a mild degree to our own shift, and it has been assailed bitterly. There were a few progressives who worked out a way to meet it and check it on the field, but the two sets of theorists were as a rule not allowed to continue their warfare of brains, and the game promptly relapsed into its former settled condition.

Colonial teams, notably those from Australia and South Africa, landed in England with new ideas built on the old foundations, and made so thorough a sweep of the important matches that the old-timers paused once more to take stock, only to decide in the end that these innovations were what is customarily known in England as "tricky" and hence outside the spirit of the rules. In our own country these novelties would have met with favor, and the man who devised them would have been hailed as the greatest coach of his time. Had Lorin F. Deland, of Harvard, inventor of the famous flying wedge, undertaken any such revolution in the English game, I am inclined to believe that he would have been roundly condemned for his temerity and his system of play checked at once and on the field by the referee. It is possible that some day an innovation as startling will be tried in English Rugby, but certain it is that the temperament of the English player, and above all the referee, is not yet ripe for it.

Our game, because of the continued possession of the ball, is far more sharply divided into attack and defense, and for that reason the two branches of play are vastly dissimilar, Yet the one is no more attractive to the player than the other, and there are specialists in both. There is nothing in the English game and never has been that puts the player quite so thoroughly on his mettle as play on the defense as it is understood in the American game. Again, there is not a Plan, as in the English game, but many plans, and although there are, as in attack, certain well-understood basic principles, there is again the versatility and the initiative, both team and individual, that the English game lacks.