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Kansas University. Weekly.
away from the first, as usual, and devote all its time, energy and enthusiasm to the second, or whether the time is not ripe to dispense with the whole and engage in something more profitable. The proposition to give up the oratorical contest is no new one here, but has been more and more strongly urged during the past two years and has received a steadily increasing support, and yet sentiment seems to have crystallized much more rapidly elsewhere, for it is reported that at least two other institutions will withdraw from the state association this year.
Locally, interest in the oratorical contest has been decreasing of late years; that is, if the attendance at the contest and the number of contestants may serve as indications. The explanation of the situation may be found, we think, in a little paragraph which we read in one of the exchanges early in the fall; it was merely a local item stating that half a dozen students of that school were already hard at work practicing upon their orations. It requires a long time to write a winning oration; not so much in gathering materials, for very few facts or arguments are necessary, but in perfecting the language and filling in the fine words and high sounding phrases which are supported to constitute the oratory. Then night after night and week after week of patient practice in delivery must follow before the
work of producing an orator is complete. It takes too much time to gain an end of too little value and the University man realizes that he can derive but little benefit from the process. The same amount of energy turned in a slightly different course will profit him much more.
The oratorical contest develops very little real oratory; it does offer some inducement to the essayist and he generally wins the prize. Furthermore, the dominating desire to win at all hazards, and the attempt to display a fertility of invention and a richness of vocabulary which are the legitimate product only of years of study and development, leads the contestant irresistibly toward that pitfall of disgrace from which no one seems to be safe—plagiarism. We believe that very few knowingly become guilty of this charge; collegemen are rarely found guilty of like offences in any other field of rivalry; it is the fault of the system, and so long as we continue to encourage it, we must charge ourselves with the shame and suffering of the many who fall. The sacrifice must be stopped. Apparently the only way it can be done is by abolishing the oratorical contest. Other colleges and universities are doing so, let K. U. keep well to the front. The time is propitious. We can easily turn all our energies to the system of intercollegiate debate. Let us join issue in the new forum with our proper rivals, the neighboring state universities.
LITERARY.
History of the Game of Tennis.
It is early morning in Lousaune. A party of newly arrived Americans, wishing to efface the unpleasant recollections of a long day's ride in a crowded compartment, start from their pension for Lake Geneva, to all appearances only a short distance away. Ten minutes brisk walking, however, is sufficient to convince them that appearances are at their old tricks. The fresh mountain air seems to call up visions of steaming coffee with rolls and honey, and the stout old lady has just begun to think of suggesting a hasty retreat, when a turn in the road brings before her eyes the first familiar sight they have rested upon for weeks. It is a row of tennis courts,—of scrupulously clean, asphalt tennis courts, with beautifully regular snow-white boundary lines—and the boy of the party instinctively clinches his hand over an imaginary racket, while his small sister asks innocently, "Oh, do they play tennis in Switzerland?"
In Switzerland! Why, the sun peeping over the mountains there, could tell, if he wished, of a glorious game he has been watching be-