THE RELATION Or ATHLETICS TO THE COLLEGE 167
second to none in the land and accommodations for at least a
thousand students. We endeavor to give a; stranger an idea of
the magnitude of the place and invariably his first utterance is;
"How many students are there ?" When such a question is
answered further words in praise of the College are wasted, for
the interrogator at once measures it by its student roll and looks
upon our further information as the imaginings of an enthusi
astic dreamer. Sometimes, however, such skeptics can be per
suaded to visit the College. When they do so and see the truth
fulness of the representations that are made of it the wonderment
at the small student roll is impressed all the more on their minds.
What is needed is students. Students more than anything
else. If there were eight hundred students at State to-day the
matter of procuring appropriations enough to complete the great
work of up-building that has already begun would be of cotnpar-,
atively insignificant import. Legislators would favor the College
who really know nothing of it now, because they measure its
needs and its good by the number of students it has.
There are many ways to be suggested by which the student roll
might be built up, but the one that impresses itself most forcibly
on our mind is through the advertising that is secured through
the medium of athletics. It is not our purpose to discuss the
various views held by persons who think athletics carried to ex
tremes in our colleges of to-day, suffice it to say that the athlete
is not leading his class in the inverse order and when he is grad
uated it is with enough physical development to play a good
second to the mental training he has secured.
Athletic advertising is the best that can be had now. There
never was a time when the minds of men and boys ran more to
superiority in college sports than they do to-day. The two games
of foot ball that were played last month by our team, the one at
the University of Pennsylvania, the other at Princeton, did more
to advertise The Pennsylvania State College than anything that
has been clone in that line for a year. Get our foot ball team
into the Big Four class, put a base ball team on the diamond that
will bring such newspaper headings as "State Wins a Great
Victory," and send a creditable track team to all the important
meets and students will literally foll6w them to the institution.
It is all right to talk about high standing, hard working insti-