The propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of their implements, and to reduce them to what Spencer calls regimentation, is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play. This, to be sure, has developed old-fashioned rounders to modern baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the elaborate Draconian laws, diplomacy, judicial and legislative procedures, concerning "eligibility, transfer, and even sale of players." In some games international conformity is gravely discussed. Even where there is no tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily hampering nature and the free play of personality. Togs and targets, balls and bats, rackets and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet, jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and professionalism. Not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. Runners, sprinters, and jumpers,[18] we are told, on the basis of many careful measurements, must be tall, with slender bodies, narrow but deep chests, longer legs than the average for their height, the lower leg being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms, narrow hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of small girth. Every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer individual adjustments. His dosage of work must be kept well within the limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his recuperative power. His personal nascent periods must be noted, and initial embarrassment carefully weeded out.
The field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber those of industries and occupations in the census. Plays and games differ in seasons, sex, and age. McGhee[19] has shown on the basis of some 8,000 children, that running plays are pretty constant for boys from six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind boys and run steadily less from eight to eighteen. In games of choice, boys showed a slight rise at sixteen and seventeen, and girls a rapid increase at eleven and a still more rapid one after sixteen. In games of imitation girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight, pubescent fall. In those games involving rivalry boys at first greatly excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year, both showing marked pubescent increment. Girls have the largest number of plays and specialise on a few less than boys, and most of these plays are of the unorganized kinds. Johnson[20] selected from a far larger number 440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a course by school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and also according to their educational value as teaching observation, reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, geography, history, and biography, physical training, and specifically as training legs, hand, arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. Most of our best games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But children are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily learn new ones. Since the Berlin Play Congress in 1894 the sentiment has grown that these are of national importance and are preferable to gymnastics both for soul and body. Hence we have play-schools, teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work. Several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be given by plays and games alone on the principle that there is no profit where there is no pleasure or true euphoria.