The suggestion may seem a trifle bizarre at first glance, but a little reflection will show that horse racing has had a close relation to the intellectual life from the earliest times. In all sacred and profane literature the horse has been the intimate friend of man, and it has been his mission to take upon his broad shoulders the load that had become too heavy for his master. The sun itself travelled in a chariot drawn by the most beautiful and the swiftest horses.

It will be at once recognized that a horse race has all the advantage of a football bout and lacks many of its objectionable qualities.

In the first place, it is a better money-maker than a football show. Secondly, it is the sort of event on which the old grads and the undergrads can bet in more way than they can even in football. In the third place, it has the great advantage that the whole audience, including the feminine part, can understand it.

This last point may have its practical advantages. True, many thousands of dollars are spent every year in paying the admission to football games for those who have only the faintest notion of what the game means or how it is played. But in this very fact there is a danger. It may be that people will grow weary of paying good money to watch a show they do not comprehend. But horse racing is as old as civilization and promises to live to the end of time. It has a universal human appeal. It is more conservative to tie up to horse racing as a steady income than to football, which has indeed proved a paying investment in recent years, but which may go bad in the market at any moment, like many other investments that seemed so fair only three years ago. Think what a pot of money a Harvard-Yale horse race would take in!

Of course there are simple-minded people who still inquire what need a university has to make money out of a football team, particularly when the boys who earn the money have to work so hard that they have very little time for the intellectual life which is assumed to be the purpose of the university. Such people point to the fact that no great university of the Old World--not Oxford, nor Paris, nor Berlin, nor Bologna--has ever made a cent out of football. But this is all beside the point. Our universities did not grow into universities as did those of Europe. They assumed the name just as a good man in Kentucky acquires the title of Colonel. They are in a large measure made up of undergraduate colleges, schools of business, correspondence schools, music schools, and all the other things that serve to attract students. This state of affairs is likely to continue for a long time, and these institutions will desire to obtain large sums of money to maintain an athletic regime so that their boys may be induced to play games which apparently they would not otherwise play. Hence the need for football or some equally good money-getter.

It is from this consideration that horse racing commends itself so admirably as a substitute for football. It will bring in just as much money--perhaps more. It will give the boys time to study. It will save the lives of a number of boys every year. It will bring the youth into acquaintance with that noble servant of man, the horse. Here is the solution of the problem of how the collages can make enough money out of one sport to support an elaborate programme of athletics while at the same time protecting their students from the commercializing tendencies of the process. Horse racing is the answer. Once more let the noble animal lift from the shoulders of mankind a load which becomes year by year more difficult to carry.