best amateur cricketers were only able to play on Saturdays, while professionals played six days in the week, the latter would very soon outclass the former, and the conjunction of the two as competitors become impracticable.
We can now advance a step, and apply our axiom to the Rugby game. The professional is bound to outstrip and leave behind the amateur. We will suppose, for instance, that the Rugby Union have legitimatized professionalism. What follows? The amateur will play as he does at present, each Saturday afternoon. His business avocations will prevent his playing oftener, and will not allow him sufficient leisure for anything like regular training. The professional will play, say, three days a week. He has all and every day in which to perfect himself at the game, and get thoroughly fit. A team of professionals, by regular practice together, will become as smoothly co-ordinated as a machine. The amateur will look on the game as affording him exercise and recreation, the professional as providing him with the means of livelihood, which will vanish the moment his form deteriorates, or he is supplanted by a better exponent of the art—contingencies which will be always before his eyes, and cannot fail to act as a perpetual stimulus to excel.
Under such conditions can any one doubt what the result will be? The amateur will be too heavily handicapped to keep on terms, and in a brief period will drop behind out-classed. Old clubs, with splendid records, will gradually recede into obscurity. The interest which formerly surrounded their doings will gradually fade away, and the fickle public will transfer their patronage to their more brilliant rivals. Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing devastates like disaster. Disheartened by defeat, and outclassed in an unequal struggle, amateur clubs will one by one drop away,
