A generous partisanship in sports is on the whole a healthful thing. It is at least natural; for he who has at his heart a throng of happy reminiscences of his own club, his own game, his own peculiar ground, has always a tendency to attribute to them in some degree the buoyant happiness of those early sports. The comrade who fought stoutly with him in many a hardly contested field, the rules which were once as the flag beneath which they all strove side by side, become to him in after years haloed with somewhat of the romance which makes the soldier glow at the sight of the colours under which he met and conquered danger. In all such cases reason is dominated by feelings too warm and hearty to be deplored, even when the impulses of boyish enthusiasm cause the listener to smile with incredulity.

Unless he is wilfully aggressive, therefore, in denouncing other games, the Australian footballer is following only a natural and healthy impulse when he looks round on all the developments of his sport that the world possesses, and feels that there is none like his own. He visits England, and watches with interest and respect the great contests which are there to be seen, and then he turns back with satisfaction to his own outlying corner of the earth, and his heart warms within him to remember the 'Laws of the Australian Game of Football,' and all the jolly associations connected therewith. And perhaps we shall not be incautious or injudicious if we go with him so far as to agree that there is no football game which appears to a crowd of spectators so quick, so picturesque, and so interesting. What other city of half a million people can, like Melbourne, show its gatherings of from ten to twenty thousand people at its principal matches every Saturday and public holiday throughout a whole season? It is not too much to say that fifty or sixty thousand people are assembled in one part or other of Melbourne every Saturday afternoon to behold their favourite matches, a single match having repeatedly attracted more than thirty thousand.

And it is astonishing to see how deeply absorbed the great crowds are in the progress of the game, and to hear with what unanimity the spontaneous roar goes up at some sudden turn in the progress of the play - that hollow roar, short and deep, often heard a mile away on an afternoon of tempered winter sunshine.

Whether rightly or wrongly, the Australian footballer who has toiled in uniform for a few seasons, or the old stager who has 'barracked,' as it is locally called, for the club of his district during half a dozen winters, will agree in declaring that the game of football, as evolved under the guidance of Providence in Australia, is the crowning mercy vouchsafed to the human race Sydney and Melbourne are the two cities which in most things take the lead throughout Australia, and in football, as in many other matters, they have led along divergent lines. In both cities the football which was played a generation back was like that of England in the same period, uncertain and subject to a hundred local variations. In Sydney this vagueness has given way to the full adoption of the Rugby Union Rules, which have been altered from time to time to keep pace with the Union in England, the colonial divergences being slight. Queensland has followed the lead of the elder colony, and New Zealand is unswervingly loyal to the Rugby game.

In Melbourne there was a feeling, as far back as 1858, that without strict rules football was apt to degenerate into a rough contest no higher in level than mere horse-play. And yet, the Rugby rules being generally voted slow, the players of the city-were thrown back upon the necessity of developing a game of their own; the objects in view being very much the same as those of the English Association, to prevent unnecessary roughness, to make the game fast and interesting, and to encourage the development of skill as an element of at least equal importance with courage and strength.

The result has been favourable, and the Victorian game has worked out for itself solutions of various problems on different lines, but with strictly analogous results to those described as the 'Association Game' in a previous chapter. All Victoria followed the lead of Melbourne, then South Australia and afterwards Tasmania gave in their adhesion to the new system, and it is the game as played in these three colonies that is known by the name of the 'Australian Game.' The outcome of this development has been that a team now plays with a discipline, a self-abnegation, a solidarity of aim, which the game has never before known upon Australian soil.

To gain easily some idea of the manner in which the Australian game differs from the English, let us image to ourselves an afternoon spent in watching the pastime, dreaming that we occupy a place in the long rows of one of the grand stands in Melbourne or in Adelaide; that we look down on a turf of wintry green, flooded with the sunlight of an azure dome. Flags are fluttering, and forty athletes in close-fitting uniform are below - for the Australian game always plays twenty on a side, except where some handicap has been allowed.

Unlike the practice of the English game, the players of both teams are dotted in pairs all over the field from goal to goal, each man of one team having a man of the other team beside him. As for the field itself, it is larger than is usual in England, the English maximum being the Australian minimum. In Australia the goals must be not less than 150 yards apart nor more than 200 yards. The minimum width is 100 yards and the maximum 150 yards. The additional room is probably an advantage in Australia, where the public reserves in all towns are spacious enough to make it possible. On the whole, there is an inclination to keep the size of the field at about 180 yards in length by about 140, which seems to be the space best adapted for the exertions of forty combatants.