"Something is rotten in the State" of Chess. That our glorious game which Diderot, endorsed by Goethe, calls "the test-stone of the human brain," should hardly be known to more than one out of five thousand people in countries where every man has a voice and a vote practically in framing the laws and in regulating the destinies of nations; that our noble pastime, which undoubtedly affords a splendid training of the intellectual faculties, should stand on a lower level in public estimation, if measured by the financial support accorded to the game, than some sports of questionable utility, shows a deplorable apathy among reasonable men toward an acknowledged healthy, mental exercise, and a want of appreciation of its enjoyments that is all the more remarkable under the circumstance, that great progress has already been made in the cultivation and popularity of the game during the last twenty years. Having myself during that long period made a study of the causes of the evil and a practice of remedying it as far as was in my own power, I now beg to report the result of my experiences, which no doubt will be interesting to the public, as they comprise some new autobiographical statements of considerable importance to the Chess historian, and some useful hints to future prominent players, to whom the public will assign the task of promoting and extending our scientific amusement. As for the causes of depression and stagnation in Chess matters, which sometimes degenerated for years in succession into partial decay of our noble pastime, I have distinctly traced it to a mental malady, which first affects some so-called Chess critics, and thence infects public opinion through the medium of newspapers which in our days, when almost every body is more or less of type-worshipper on matters that are not within his own personal knowledge, exercise an enormous influence on the minds of readers, who are not well acquainted with the subject. Like other mental afflictions the malady sometimes takes a turn dangerous to the patient as well to the public at large, and it is certainly the duty of the doctor who has such an unfortunate individual under treatment to prevent his doing any harm to himself and others. As a matter of course, a violent struggle sometimes takes place between the physician and his patient, and I merely allude to this in order to explain that my dissertation on the diagnosis of the intellectual derangements among so-called Chess critics and the mode of curing them, will be necessarily mixed up and involved with a historical description of some journalistic fights or literary gambits which I have had to contest with some of my patients and opponents.
Having traced the general Chess depression to its true source a brief preliminary reference to the cause of the disease among the Chess critics themselves, may not be out of place. It originates from a disorder called excessive egotism, and in some great measure this in turn may be due to the unhealthy state of the moral atmosphere outside of Chess, which fosters such abnormal philosophical growths as Mercenarism and Individualism on the one extreme, and Socialism or Anarchism on the other. But the investigation of those subjects would take us too far, and I merely allude to the deeper hidden causes of the prevailing distemper en passant