Now, prize-fighting is a far severer test than a one-hundred-and-twenty yards' sprint over hurdles. How severe it is can be told in almost one sentence.
Sharkey and Jeffries had a memorable fight of one hour. In that hour it was found that Sharkey had lost thirteen pounds and Jeffries eleven pounds and a half. These men were both trained to the hour before they went into the ring, and the loss of weight alone shows how tremendous the exertion and strain must have been.
The best way for the fighter, of course, is never to go out of training, strictly to limit what he drinks with his meals, and prevent himself ever going up more than a pound or two; but if he has put on weight, the best way of taking it off is not to go into physical training at once, but to begin by cutting out all drinking with his meals. Half an hour before a meal and two hours afterwards, he should drink nothing. In a month he will be lighter than he ever was, probably even than he was in his first training, and then he can begin by careful exercise and very careful feeding to increase his strength once more and get himself perfectly fit.
Perhaps I should say here too that unfortunately boxing has won such vogue in the last two or three decades that the influence of money has corrupted and degraded the prize-ring. No one can be a champion and be honest; it is almost unthinkable. Big money wants to bet on a certainty: a man cannot be as sure of winning as of losing; hence he will be a better instrument for making money on if he consents to lose than if he wanted to win. The fact is patent, obvious, corroborated by experience everywhere.
Is baseball honest? Is horse-racing honest? Ask a real prize-fighter: "Is prizefighting honest?" and he'll laugh in your face.
I have only written these recollections of prize-fighters to justify my opinion that the prize-fight is an evil, and boxing one of the lowest forms of athletics. I am very sorry that the French and Germans have taken it up as they have, but fortunately, in the last thirty years, the French have taken up every form of athletics with passionate enthusiasm. I remember thirty years ago seeing some regiments drilling near Toulon; someone had put up a rail about two feet six in height for the men to run and jump over. It was perfectly comic to see how most of the soldiers jumped with both feet together. At the request of the colonel, I went over and showed them how they should jump the rail, taking it in their stride. Thirty years later the ordinary French boy has learned how to jump and how to run, too, while at cycling he is probably as good as any.
The worst evil of boxing came through its increased popularity. As soon as it was taken up in America, the quick Irish-Americans found out that two blows were likely to be decisive; the first blow is an upward stroke catching the chin, which produces a shock on the vertebrae and often results in partial paralysis; the other is the blow on the spleen, which is spoken of as the blow in the pit of the stomach; but when the spleen is really hit, it turns the man sick and he has very little strength for the next ten or fifteen minutes, in spite of perfect training.
I remember one boy in London who had learned the chin blow perfectly; he used always to mix it, at half-arm's length, at about the third round and take whatever punishment he got smiling; but would suddenly flash out either left or right with an upper cut to the chin, which, even if it didn't catch the spot perfectly, was usually sufficient to decide the fight.
It is this knowledge of the weak parts of our frame that has made prizefighting so intolerably brutal. In my time at the National Sporting Club in London there were two or three old boxers who were still hangers-on at the club, whose heads were all knocked on one side, and faces distorted with partial paralysis, the dreadful debris of human savagery. Wrestling is a far better exercise than prize-fighting and far less likely to injure any of the contestants permanently.
I must not be taken to mean that brutality is chiefly or solely English and German; it is to be found also, though in a less degree, in France and the Latin countries, as well as in northern Europe. I remember once being horrified by seeing Salammbo on the films in France. I recalled that Flaubert represented the poor fellow being beaten almost to death by the crowd, including women.
The whole brutal exhibition was put on before one with an intense realism, and the crowd delighted in the appalling exhibition. I left the theatre thinking it would take a thousand years to civilize a French crowd; and an Italian crowd is no better, and a Spanish crowd is just as bad.
I am full of tolerance, I think, for all mortal weaknesses; I can easily forgive all the frailties of the flesh and all the sins of the spirit, with the sole exception of cruelty. Cruelty to man or beast, to rat or snake, seems to me the unforgivable sin, the one utterly loathsome and damnable crime that shows utter degradation, the devil in man.
Of course there are degrees even in this villainy; cruelty to animals adds cowardice to the diabolic.
In Rome once I stopped a peasant who was beating a horse unmercifully: and when I told him he ought to be ashamed of himself, he declared that he would beat the creature as he pleased because it had no soul; and this excuse was urged not once, but twenty times, in favor of sadic cruelties practiced on dogs and cats. Was it thoughtlessness or want of imagination or something brutal in man's nature? I often asked myself, but never found an answer.
During a winter spent in Spain I got to know and like the Premier, Canovas Del Castillo. I made him a proposal which I thought interesting; that he should send twenty or thirty of the masterpieces of the Prado Gallery in Madrid to London for the season, especially a dozen paintings of Velasquez, who was then very little known in England. He said at once that if the British government would reciprocate he would do it willingly: the pictures could easily be sent by special train, or on a special warship, or in two or three parcels, so as to diminish the risk of loss. He agreed with me that the international effect of such an exchange could only be inspiring.
When I returned to England I saw Lord Salisbury on the matter, but to my astonishment he held up his hands and wouldn't hear of it, "I am glad I have no power," he said, "it isn't within the range of my duties. You would have to go to the trustees of the National Gallery in order to get the permission, and I don't think they would consent." I sounded one or two of them, but found they all wanted to shelter themselves behind the impossible.
I only mention the matter here because it was one of the many pleasant talks that made me appreciate the Spanish Premier's mind and character. Talking to him once about bull-fighting, to my astonishment he agreed with me that the killing of the horses was shamefully brutal and mere torture.
"Why not stop it?" I asked. "The play of the chulos at first and putting in the banderillas is extremely fine and interesting with just sufficient danger to make it enthralling; and the killing of the bull with a sword thrust is such an extraordinary feat that every one would wish to have seen it; but the lancers, who on horseback torture the bull to attack the poor old horses and tear them to pieces, constitute a dreadful exhibition."
Canovas finally declared that he would try to stop that part of bullfighting; and he kept his word. Everyone remembers the result: the mob left the bullring hissing and shouting and went after the Premier, who had to take refuge in the Royal Palace and then flee out of the back door and get away from Madrid. The thing the Spanish populace most loved was the horrible cruelty and torturing of the poor, broken-down horses.