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None the less, just such women are needed by business. No one, I imagine, would claim with any seriousness that the entrance of women into business millions of them has thus far made any appreciable impression on the business spirit. It is a noteworthy as well as deplorable fact that where women have become employers they have almost without exception fallen into those same practices that have made men the target of business critics. It is therefore to the vision of a relatively small group of business women who refuse to relinquish their business ideals, and to whom existing conditions are not congenial, that we must look for some of the leaven of business life. These are women who have been drawn into business, in part at least, by their desire to feel themselves factors in social growth and welfare.

Happily there remains for business women in general one means of attaining satsifaction in business life, or an aid to that end, which has not yet been developed to anything like the extent to which it is, I believe, susceptible. I refer to the cultivation on their part of friendly relations with business men. Friendship among business men the cement that holds them together in mutually profitable business efforts.

Men advance in business quite as often because they are liked by other men as because they are capable. Women, in their efforts to prove themselves, have too often sacrificed the business graces to a rigorous but sterile pursuit of the business virtues. If business men have been far from hospitable to business women, the women, on the other hand, are not wholly free from blame. They have accepted too readily the rôle of competitors; have shown perhaps as often as men in recent years, at any rate a streak, only lightly veiled, of antagonism.

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There is need, unquestionably, for radical readjustment on both sides for greater magnanimity from business men, and for more deft, more skillful adaptation from business women. If the business woman will insist on agreeing that the business man is an adversary, she must recognize that he is a powerful one and that, on the whole, her chances are probably better of winning than of whipping him. But should the miracle of miracles happen, and the business man decide to cultivate the friendship of the business woman, a diplomatic victory of no mean calibre would be achieved, with the participants on both sides thereby immeasurably strengthened.

NATIONAL TRAITS IN LAWN TENNIS

BY A. WALLIS MYERS

THE authors of lawn tennis have much to their credit. They founded a pastime which permits men and women of all nationalities to meet in friendly competition under a common code of rules. But this was not their only benefaction to mankind. The game, by its popular vogue and catholicity, has provided a medium for physical and mental expression that is satisfying both to the individual and to the patriot. 'Words but direct, example must allure,' says Stirling. The athletic emancipation of women, one of the features of the present decade, has been hastened and nourished by lawn tennis, a game so happy in its scope for industry, movement, and grace. No invention could have been better timed. It arrived to give society of either sex not only exercise and health, but, as its cult developed, an art through which national characteristics could be exploited. The lawn-tennis court became an international arena; the language of the court assumed the power and utility of Esperanto; frontiers melted before the game; the pride of race and individuality was none the less stimulated.

Lawn tennis was first pursued on private English lawns by middle-aged people. Its original disciples had been addicted to rackets and real tennis, the royal and ancient game. They were men of part or whole leisure, and their womenfolk, praising Providence for providing an outdoor exercise more

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violent than croquet that could give them an athletic status equal to that held by their lords, embraced it, first with curiosity and then with devotion. Croquet hoops and mallets were flung down, domestic lawns were bisected by nets; in some cases, where Nature interfered, noble oaks and elms were sacrificed. Lawn tennis spread, not with the violence and speed of the prairie fire, but gently and insidiously, like influenza. It was a social diversion, frequently lampooned by Punch, never taken seriously by those who did not pursue it, never visualized as a world sport by those who did. Its first adherents were men of sedate habits and of muscles trained for games with standard and fixed styles. The feet were anchored for the service, the face of the racket was little more than half the size of the present-day weapon, the net was high and sagging, the balls were not always covered with cloth, the staple stroke was a slice as in tennis, and the side-line drive was unknown. The game was grafted on to ancient games by a conservative people. The prophets of the seventies might have seen in this very fact the germ of greatness; it was not detected until the Renshaw twins, with youth and supple limbs at their command, revealed the potentialities of a vigorous, competitive art.

The Renshaw brothers were the real fathers of lawn tennis as we know it to-day, and had they not accepted the

faith, making converts by their personality and other champions by their example, it is conceivable that the pastime would have died a natural death, or at any rate have been in suspended animation. It may be noted in passing that the twins developed their art, not on a turf surface, but on a covered floor of tar asphalt. This fact was significant. The original nursery of the game in England was a private lawn, frequently mossy, generally clotted in the matter of grass roots; well mown, of course, but more like a Turkey carpet than the firm, resilient plane on which the modern game has been bred. The motto of the aboriginals was 'safety first'; they had to dig the ball out of the ground. The gardener's ideal of a lawn-tennis court in the eighties—and the first chamand the first championship meetings at Wimbledon embraced it was that honored in the college quadrangles at Oxford and Cambridge. When invading sight-seers asked for the recipe the answer would be, 'Mow and roll every day for five hundred years.'

The English style was founded on such a surface; it may be said to have been handicapped by it ever since. Half a century ago the prevailing habit was to hit the ball from corner to corner an almost interminable exchange; and for this custom the nature of the surface was the main cause. Ireland attained distinction because her countrymen then, as now, iconoclastic invented a running drive, a kind of forcing shot off a low ball. "Turf' is a dialect word for peat, and many a court resembled an Irish bog. It was by perfecting a low running drive that Mr. W. J. Hamilton, one of a brilliant Dublin group, won both the English and the Irish championship, and it was another Irishman, Mr. J. C. Parke, whose powers of mobility on a wet court, developed on the Rugby

football field, made him famous b in England and in Australia. Parke was not a greater player in classical sense; his service was unp vocative; he had limitations as volleyer. Leinster gave him his ch acter; a stout arm and a stout he won him his victories.

But I would return to my poi which is that surface, like 'dress Dav has made all the difference. Had la tennis been pursued only on lawns career would undoubtedly have be cabined and confined. It would ne have become a world pastime, for reason that grass courts are unknown many countries. Save in England a Ireland there are no turf courts Europe, and yet the game flourish throughout the length and breadth the Continent. I am writing this ar cle at Cannes, almost within a ston throw of the original outdoor court France. Constructed of a binding sar extracted from the Estérel Mountai a beautiful feature of the Côte d'Az it was laid down in the garden of t Beau Site Hôtel in the early eight in order that the Renshaw brothe wintering abroad, might pursue th hobby. This court has become famo not only by virtue of its history, b because almost every champion, i cluding several champions from Am ica, has played on it. After Cann came other courts of a similar substan on the Riviera. The game had alrea been practised on covered courts Paris; other capitals met a growi demand. Stockholm, illustrating Swe ish enterprise, built quite a flock covered courts, installing artificial lig to defy the winter.

It was natural that Continent players should develop at a great speed than those from England, whe climate and surface checked incub tion. It is true that for nearly a deca no really first-class player from Fran

emerged, and the British pilgrim of first-class rank could generally anticipate victory at the summer tournaments which he visited. This ascendancy, appearing to ignore the incidence of surface, was only temporary. It was due partly to the colonizing faculty of the British, permitting them to impose their coolness and phlegm in a new environment, and partly to the relative inexperience of their opponents. The strokes of Max Decugis and André Gobert were more fluent and pleasing to the eye than those of men who beat them at first in actual match play; the will to win, dominant in the visitor, was absent. As soon as it was cultivated -and its growth was essential—the tables were turned. The benefits of surface, of quicker footwork, of a firm eye, were realized. The Dohertys, with their outstanding genius, could always beat the best Frenchmen, Germans, or Belgians of their age just as they beat, save on one or two memorable occasions, the best Americans. But the Dohertys had classical strokes and a temperament far above the average. They stood out in their epoch just as the Renshaws stood out before them and Mlle. Lenglen and Tilden after them. They betrayed national characteristics as other champions betrayed them, but they were thrown up, almost in splendid isolation, by the evolution of time. No one country can claim or can expect a monopoly for such phenomena. It might be assumed that either France, which has produced Suzanne Lenglen, or America, which has provided Helen Wills, would have supplied successors or antitypes of these fine stroke players. Both have inspired the youth of their respective countries; they have fired a trail among the girlhood of Europe and America and of countries beyond which is still blazing; and if one is now a professional and the other

remains an amateur the value of their personalities in developing women's play cannot be overestimated. And yet, strange to say, neither France nor America has produced the player who is likely to be regarded in the near future as an even greater artist than either of these two.

The distinction will probably fall on Spain, for in Señorita Elia de Alvarez, the most brilliant exponent of the modern game, has been discovered a girl of twenty-two who with grace of movement combines a vigorous stroke and an intuitive skill which make her the most fascinating player to watch the world has ever produced. Though born of Spanish parents she has spent nearly all her life outside Spain - in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, and England, migrating from place to place with her parents. This movement has nourished her versatility; she is adept at languages and at many other sports besides lawn tennis. It has also deepened her character; she would be much less a great artist if she had spent her life in Spain. National traits fluency of movement, impetuosity, dignity of carriage-are visible, but she has developed mentally in excess of her sisters because of her contact with the outer world; not otherwise would she have attained the self-reliance which is at once a feature and a force in her lawn tennis.

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During the half century of lawn tennis the sceptre of power may be said to have passed to five countries in turn. It may not be unprofitable to note these cycles in sequence and to examine their causes. England was naturally preeminent in the first epoch. Her natives had founded the game, competition from outside was limited and fugitive; laurels were collected

more or less automatically. But the strokes and strategy of Englishmen had been developed and intensified by international matches with Ireland. When the Renshaws retired, the English group surrounding them missed their inspiration, and since most of its members were middle-aged the standard of play was inclined to fall. Irish enterprise and audacity revived it, and Dublin provided in Dr. Joshua Pim a champion whose game had the hall mark of genius. The matches for the championship at Wimbledon between Pim and Wilfred Baddeley crystallized two schools the cautious, calculating methods of the Englishman and the robust, adventurous, devil-may-care style of the Irishman. The latter did not always prevail, but its greater brilliance was undeniable, and when Pim was at his best he was virtually unplayable. It is scarcely exaggerating to say that he could hit a dollar note placed anywhere on the court. When America saw Dr. Pim in the early Davis Cup matches, he had emerged from retirement and was but a shadow of the real champion. Both Pim and Baddeley were all-court players; they had absorbed the art of the Renshaws, though neither had the rapidity of execution of William or the meticulous accuracy of Ernest.

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Evolution had been at work steadily. The Renshaws had to create strokes there had been none to guide them; their successors got the benefit of precedent and the encouragement of example. As the Renshaws began England's supremacy, so the reign of the Dohertys ended it. These famous brothers lacked the fire and physique of some of their predecessors and many of their successors, but they resisted all comers for ten years. An occasional defeat in the doubles at Wimbledon only served to emphasize the volume of their triumphs. They were the 'princes

charming' of the lawn-tennis court, and the grace of their deportment and the serenity of their temper have never been equaled. Yet, perfect stylists as they were, with no vulnerable spot in their armor, it may be doubted whether the increased pace and tension of tennis in recent years would not have exposed their physique to an insupportable strain. It is true that they won matches in the heat and tumult of America against America's picked men, but the American players at the beginning of the century were not so versatile in attack or so powerful in service and drive as their successors of the last decade. It has been said that, given present-day conditions, the Dohertys would have mastered them just as they mastered the googly service of Dwight Davis and Holcombe Ward when they first encountered it.

The game, however, has moved forward with each succeeding decade. The advance may not be detected as and when it occurs; the faithful historian in looking back is conscious of it. In women's play progress has been well-nigh revolutionary even within the last fifteen years. The champions of the past, could they be restored at their best, would have no chance against the champions of the present. Improved equipment, changes in dress, greater opportunities for practice, the stimulant of publicity, have all promoted progress.

Australasia was the third country to furnish the world's champions. Norman Brookes for two years and Anthony Wilding for four won the title at Wimbledon, and between them these two envoys carried off the Davis Cup. The first was an artist, unmatched in volleying skill, the second an athlete, wielding drives sustained in vigor by inexhaustible stamina. Both possessed the confidence and courage indigenous to their respective countries in sport,

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