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Show Sporting Life. Another ministerial crusade is threatened, and this time prize-flghting is to he pelted with the priestly truncheon. This line of attack appears to have been inspired by the recent Welsh-Nelson controversy, which the ministers refer to as having hav-ing been exceedingly brutal. Is it to be inferfed from this that some of the ministers were present at the fistic carnival? If not, how do they know It was brutal, since no such misstatement appeared ap-peared in the reliable papers? Prize-fighting is not nearly so vicious as many other evils upon the obliteration of which the ministers min-isters might concentrate their energies, and in regard re-gard to its brutality ft is merely a lamb-like gambol gam-bol compared with the gory ramifications of a football game, against which we hear no reverberations reverber-ations of wrath from the parsons. Long before Samson unbent his ponderous limbs and felt the might of his puissant frame, Man had learned to look with wrapt admiration upon battles between men of physical prowess. The measuring one man's greatness against another's an-other's in a mental or physical way, Is as natural nat-ural as the cooing of babes, and is evident in all forms of physical life. All the resolutions of all the ministers in the warm, kind world are powerless pow-erless to prevent struggles for physical supremacy. suprem-acy. Prize-fights are not essentially brutal. Men in the pugilistic business are in such splendid physical phys-ical condition that they usually recuperate with ease and without ultimate injury from the severest sever-est contest, and casualties in ring battles are usually unworthy of notice. The mayor will show lamentable weakness if he permits himself to be influenced into preventing prevent-ing honest prize-flghting on the strength of the assertions of men who are essentially and necessarily neces-sarily Ignorant of what a ring battle really is. This is one case where we do not need any "ministers of grace to defend us." |