Besides the L.A.C. there are many paper-chasing clubs around London which cultivate flat-racing in addition, and may be considered as athletic clubs quite apart from their functions as promoters of cross-country racing. Two of these, the South London Harriers and the Blackheath Harriers, are old-established clubs, and the former owns a cinder-path of its own at Balham. All the paper-chasing clubs round London have a strong esprit de corps, which occasionally, we regret to observe, manifests itself in the expression of ill-will towards rivals. The L.A.C., however, occupies a different position from them all, having amongst its roll nearly all the leading London athletes of the last twenty years, and affording a centre and a ground for the meetings of most of the others.

There is little that need be said of the other clubs throughout the country which hold athletic meetings. Few of them are athletic clubs in the same sense of the word as the University clubs or the L.A.C. In a country district it is obviously out of the question for a club to exist upon athletics apart from other kinds of manly pastime. Neither Manchester, Liverpool, nor Birmingham has a club which owns a running ground and encourages athletic practice all the year round as does the leading London institution. In purely country districts the athletic meetings are promoted and managed by the local cricket, football, or paper-chasing club, or by a committee which is got together annually for the purpose of holding a meeting, and except for the purposes of that particular meeting has no corporate existence. Many of the large provincial towns, such as Huddersfield, have clubs with a permanent existence jointly devoted to cricket and athletics, as well as other sports, separate committees managing the different branches of sport. One of these clubs - the Huddersfield C. and A.C. - was, long before the London A.C. took a similar course, registered as a limited company with leave to omit the word 'Limited' from its name.

These provincial clubs for combined athletic purposes are amongst the most flourishing and best-managed organisations in the kingdom, and perform excellent work in the cultivation and development of athletic energy.

The difficulties, then, which beset the path of a genuine amateur do not arise from want of material, but from the irruption into the amateur circle of men whose money-making propensities have gotten the better of their honesty. Thousands of men come annually from the Universities and public schools as well as from elsewhere, who could do nothing but good to themselves by competing in honest contests in running and jumping matches; but all present efforts have failed to separate from the genuine amateurs the class of those who take up athletics nominally as amateurs, but really as a means of livelihood. There are plenty of sheep and plenty of goats, and the questions which naturally arise are whether it is possible to separate them, and if so by what means; also, whether, if it be impossible to separate them, there are any means of preventing the decadence of athletic sports.

The genuine amateurs are all of one kind; they run because the exercising of their bodies gives them delight, and because, being Englishmen, they find it pleasant to have beaten an honest adversary in an honest competition. The summit of their ambition is to have met all comers and won a championship, or to have met all opponents from their club or district or from their University, or from the two Universities, and to have borne away the palm. The prizes they win are to be kept as trophies, and not to be parted with; and whether they care for handsome prizes much or little, their chief pleasure derived from the sport is the honour they have gained in their chosen pursuit. Let no one imagine we are drawing an ideal picture of the English athlete. There is a good deal of human nature in man, and there are very few runners, jumpers, or what not, who are above the temptations of winning a handsome prize. There have been plenty of genuine amateurs who have carried their love of 'pots' to an illegitimate extent, and have gone touring round the country to meetings at which they could not increase their reputation by winning, and which they have simply attended for pot-hunting purposes.

These men, however, have won the prizes with the desire to ornament their homes with them, and not with the object of increasing their weekly stipends with the gains of athletics. Such are the sheep; but the goats are of various kinds. Some of them are men who run honestly enough on the whole, but as soon as they get a prize dispose of it promptly for what it will fetch; and we fancy that silversmiths and dealers in fancy articles could, if examined before a Royal Commission upon athletics, make some strange disclosures as to the number and importance of this class. Such men soon degenerate into the other class, who find there is more to be made out of betting or 'squaring' a race than out of the prizes, and who therefore never run honestly if it pays them better to do otherwise. As for a championship with these gentry, it is not worth running for unless the 'market' can be worked, or unless the competitor meditates taking a public-house and trading upon the reputation of being an ex-champion. The number of these sham-amateurs is large, and it is a serious question whether it is possible to exclude them from the amateur fold.

At the time when amateurism first came into existence upon the running path, the amateurs, looking at the state of professional pedestrianism, were rather inclined to consider running for money as being a bad thing in itself. Whether there is anything degrading in the notion of a man gently bred running, or playing cricket or football, for money, is a wide subject which we do not care to discuss at present, and upon which public opinion would probably adopt more liberal views now than it did a quarter of a century ago. The line taken up by the earliest 'gentleman-amateurs' was, however, that it was degrading to run for money, and that amateur athletics should be confined to gentlemen. Possibly the eventual solution of the present problem will be a return to the old practice, and the gentlemen who run and jump in matches will be able to confine the amateur competitions in which they take part to their own class. Such social distinctions, however, are very hard to preserve anywhere, and particularly hard in sport, and the difficulties of defining an amateur are nothing compared to the difficulties of defining a gentleman. One thing is certain: the attempt to confine open competitions to gentleman-amateurs broke down.