Golf is certainly the prime offender. It is a scourge that has devastated the once beautiful wild sandhills and coastwise heaths, and reduced them to the titivated promenading grounds of the wealthy bounders who generally used to confine their energies to the unhealthy atmosphere of the billiard-room. The newer order of things is better for the bounders, but very bad for the unconventional beauties of the wilds. That desolating game is producing, here as elsewhere, a loafer class of caddies, cockneyfying and undermining the sturdy Cornish character, and changing the uprising rustic youth into a loafing, cigarette-smoking type of wastrel who becomes unemployable and vicious when youth is left behind, having learnt nothing but the vices of the rich, which they have not the means to satisfy, while they have lost, beyond recovery, the habit of industry. It was a bad day for England when golf crossed the Scottish border and invaded our land.
Most of the other curses of Cornwall are the direct and inevitable outcome of better local intercommunication, and of easier travel and the consequent increase of tourists and summer residents. Few ever foresaw, when corrugated, galvanised iron was introduced, how in less than a generation the tin Bungalow and the Simple Life would go hand in hand, and settle on the loneliest spots to be found along our seaboard. I will leave it for future philosophers to determine which invented the other; whether the Bungalow produced the Simple Life, or whether an already existent desire for the simplification of existence produced the Bungalow; with passing references to the Servant difficulty and to that latter-day institution, the Week-end. But it is now a well-understood and greatly practised thing that you may cheaply live in a tin house in the wilderness, without servants, on tinned provisions, and on tinned bread from the nearest machine-bakery, and yet be in the intellectual movement of the time, and without reproach, even though your sanitary arrangements be such that even the old-time cottager might consider scandalous, and although, with the lengthening of your sojourn, your rising zareba of empty tins makes ever more squalid the surroundings.
Machine-made bread is a very real offence and distress to any one who has known Cornwall for a considerable number of years, for it is a comparatively recent introduction. Until quite lately, Cornwall was one of the last strongholds of that admirable lady, the old-fashioned housewife who was proud to make her own bread. She would, dear lady, as soon thought of getting outside help for having the beds made, as purchasing what she would have called, with contemptuous inflection, "Baker's bread." But nowadays not only the resident, but the farmer even, and the veriest cottager, gets his loaf from the baker's cart that has now taken to calling for orders every morning, even in rural districts, as though they were merely London suburbs. And such a perverted taste in bread exists that not merely decent "baker's bread" now prevails in these parts, but a dry, husky, leathery kind, that is baked in tins, which Providence never intended bread to be.
DISILLUSION
He thought he saw the sun to shine
Effulgent o'er the land
He looked again—it rained in sheets,
With mud on either hand,
"If it were only dry," he said,
"This country would be grand."