Rulers, statesmen, diplomatists, begin to take more serious account of
the sport-loving factor in human nature than has been their wont.
Downing Street, Washington, the Quai d’Orsay, and all the other
nerve-centres of international affairs, where there are housed all the
cleverest modern masters of opportunism, have entered upon the study of
its peculiarities and tendencies, recognising that here is an instrument
of the most delicate perfection for the cultivation of amity between
people and people when the bureaucrats have set the lead. The British
Empire is being soldered up with sport. Besides the constant visits of
Colonial cricketers, have we not had with us recently two separate
detachments of Colonial footballers, and has it not been evident that
while the Colonial Governments have given their representatives the most
open and material support, even to the extent of voting them certain
supplies, Downing Street has smiled approvingly, and has, now and again,
when not many people were looking, given a pleasant little pat to the
wheel of friendship as it went rolling along from Cornwall to Edinburgh,
and from Blackheath to Dublin? And was it not an open secret that the
“very highest influences” were brought to bear upon the controlling
authorities, with a view to avoiding the recent breakage in the regular
sequence of Anglo-Australian encounters on the cricket field? The
_entente cordiale_ with France is being promoted from a toy model to a
big machine that is working in the streets, largely as the result of the
awakening of popular sympathies by such means as games. All the
congruous elements of different countries far apart are being attracted
to each other, as if magnetically, by such influences as the motor car,
the bicycle, cricket, football, and, far from least, by golf: and the
potency of these charms lies in the fact that when they are set to work,
men’s minds are relaxed from the general materialistic sternness of
their business times, and the humanity in them is asserting itself.
Now, all those good men who take the cosmopolitan view of human
happiness must see that among all games with powers like this there can
be none of greater adaptability and general use and efficiency than
golf. It may be, and is used by people of every colour, race, creed, and
temperament, in every climate and all the year round. No recreation,
apart from the simplest contests of the river and field, has ever been
so universal since the world began, with the single exception of chess.
And wherever and whenever it is played it extends its benign influence
towards the promotion of fast friendship among the players. There is no
freemasonry like the freemasonry of golf. To its temples in every land
are always welcomed the faithful and earnest craftsman from where’er he
came, and he is passed on the signs of the bag and the stance and the
little pimpled ball. For it is one of the articles of belief that no man
can be a good and enthusiastic golfer of experience and at the same time
a thoroughly bad fellow, for at the outset of his career the bad fellow
would never be happy in his game; others would not help to make him so,
and he would either be stung by the consciousness of his own defects and
reform, or he would slip away into the small silent pitiable minority
who leave the links one day never to return. Thus has our happy game of
golf wound a bright cordon round the world, and so does she play her
part in the great evolution of general contentment.