"I am bound to meet you on that new ground.

I won't point, gentlemen, by way of answer, to the coarseness which I can see growing on our national manners, or to the deterioration which appears to me to be spreading more and more widely in our national tastes.

You may tell me with perfect truth that I am too old a man to be a fair judge of manners and tastes which have got beyond my standards.

We will try the issue, as it now stands between us, on its abstract merits only.

I assert that a state of public feeling which does practically place physical training, in its estimation, above moral and mental training, is a positively bad and dangerous state of feeling in this, that it encourages the inbred reluctance in humanity to submit to the demands which moral and mental cultivation must inevitably make on it.