Hamilton, the most marvelous and creative genius, made constitutions, built up systems and created institutions, and yet never witnessed a base-ball game.

I feel as I stand here that all the men that have ever lived and achieved success in this world have died in vain.

I am competent to pay that tribute, because I never played a game in my life, and I never saw it but once, and then did not understand it.

A philosopher whom I always read with interest, because his abstractions sometimes approach the truth, wrote an article of some acumen several years ago, in which he said that you could mark the march of civilization and rise of liberty and its decadence by the interest which the nations took in pugilism.
The nations of the earth which submit to the most grinding of despotisms have no pugilists.

The nations of Europe which have never risen in their boasted establishments to a full comprehension of republicanism, have no pugilists.