III
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.