In a game under American rules between two well-matched teams, the players of each eleven are often on the attack, often on the defense, knowing in advance which role they are to assume. This makes for the all-round development of the player, mentally, physically and morally. Again and again he faces new situations, in which he is compelled to exercise a high order of physical and mental courage, instantaneous judgment, and initiative of the first quality. The sudden shift and shuttle of the fortunes of the game, apparently helter-skelter, but in reality orderly to the last degree, call for perhaps no quicker action than does the English game, but undoubtedly for quicker thinking.

It is this chance for diagnosis of an opponent's purpose and method that so appeals to the American temperament, and so well fits the player for the battle of life, wherein the study of character plays so large a part. One instance of such diagnosis - many come to mind - will serve to give point to my contention. It happened some years ago at the Polo Grounds in New York City, where Princeton and Cornell met in their, at that period, annual game. Glenn 8. Warner brought down from Ithaca an eleven beautifully drilled in attack under rules that had been adopted the previous winter in the hope of opening up the game. The forward pass was in use for the first time in many years. It was practically an unknown quantity. Other maneuvers foreign to the old-style game had been worked out to a high state of efficiency.

With this new and bewildering attack - the Cornellians were extremely faulty in defense - Warner's pupils began a rapid assault on the Princeton line that swept them across the last chalk mark for a touchdown. The Princeton tackles of that year were Cooney and Stannard, the former on the right, the latter on the left side of the line. Stannard was smothered by the interference, but it soon became impossible to gain ground through Cooney. Cooney began his diagnosis of the new play the moment it was tried. He counted the men in the interference; traced them when they went back to their positions. He found by this process that the two Cornell guards were in the interference on every tackle run, and he was prompt to act. Under almost any other system it would have been dangerous in the extreme for the Princeton guard next to Cooney to have swung out of his position, leaving his opponent uncared for. Yet Cooney explained the situation hurriedly to his guard, carried this man wide with him on every play, and with the extra assistance managed to spoil every Cornell smash at his side of the line. In the heat of the first few moments of the first half he had no time to pass his diagnosis and his remedy on to the other side of the line, and it was not until the lull after the first touchdown that he was able to get into touch with Stannard on the other wing. Cooney's judgment was correct, and his action perfectly applied, so that when both sides of the Tiger line knew the method of the Ithacans, Princeton won the game with something to spare and was able to rejoice in the knowledge that one of her men had faced, diagnosed under fire, and checked the first brilliant attack of the season under the new rules.

The illustration shows a Yale eleven in normal line-up. The fact that the center has undisputed possession of the ball is the foundation of American college and school football. It is the basis of all strategy and tactics and therefore the keynote of the American game.

There is nothing in English football that puts a premium on this sort of thinking. The Englishmen tell us that this is specialization. Admitting that that is exactly what it is, the answer is that it is just what we want. It makes the kind of game we want and develops the kind of men we need.

It may be difficult at first for the average man to reconcile this specialization with a game, but game it is nevertheless; for those who do not so recognize it and who subordinate the individual to a machine, attempting to make of the whole matter nothing more nor less than an exact science must inevitably come to grief. No amount of progress, no amount of advancement in the art of football - and I say "art" advisedly - will ever spoil football as a game, for it is rooted in individual excellence after all, and given two elevens equally well coached the better men will win.

Were the men moulded entirely to suit an inexorable system of play, unbending, hard, exacting, there would be a different story to tell. As a matter of fact, long years of study and experience have taught the students of tactics and strategy, the masters of generalship, that they must consider their available material before settling upon a plan of campaign. The foundation principles remain - the Yale system, the Harvard system, the Princeton, Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and Michigan systems - but the immediate plan of campaign must be sufficiently elastic to be altered again and again in the course of a season as well as from season to season, if it is to produce results.

But if football is a game, after all, and not so serious a business as many of its opponents believe, it is, nevertheless, the most important game we have, the sport that makes the heaviest demand upon every fine quality of the best possible type of athlete. It is the crucible in which character is moulded at an age when character is in the process of formation - it is, to change the simile, the white light that beats upon a young man's actions and ideals. Time was when it was customary to believe that the player could be little above an educated prize-fighter. That time has passed, for the player has lived down in after life this false reputation, and lived up to the reputation he enjoyed among those who really knew. At Harvard there is a memorial gate to one of the sweetest characters I ever knew - Marshall Newell, master of football, and at the same time guide, counsellor and friend.