In faith he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceedingly well read.
Only if he is to be the de facto authority in all cases, why not give him the three sanctions just mentioned, and make him the authority de jure? Then—as the Field is not a Whist gazette, and can scarcely be expected to devote its columns to advertising gratuitously every legislative change, and any space it has to spare is used rather for elaborating the ceremonial than for settling the laws of the cult—in token of our esteem, let us club together and present him with a piece of chalk, a duster, and a black board, to be set up in some easily-accessible spot—say, the middle of Pall Mall, or St. James’s-street. Make it the official notice-board! When new decisions are created let them be legibly inscribed upon it, coram populo! When well-known decisions are abrogated let them be carefully rubbed out at once. Since the Bastille was destroyed and lettres de cachet with it, there has been no authority without a notice-board; the Salvation Army has its “War Cry,” and the Pope himself, when he propounds a new dogma, propounds it ex cathedrâ.
That is one remedy. Though it is not perfect it has two advantages—it is inexpensive, and if in future any of us should still remain in ignorance, we should be in ignorance by our own fault, and not by misfortune; and at any rate it is a more simple and less tortuous plan than upsetting well-known decisions in an unofficial newspaper, while new editions of our two standard Whist-books are subsequently brought out without one word of comment or warning.
The alternative remedy—by no means novel, it has been suggested, usque ad nauseam, and I only bring it forward again because at present confusion is worse confounded than it has ever been in my recollection—is for the leading clubs to appoint a small committee of representative Whist-players, with power to revise any decisions they may see fit; and when they have revised them either to append them to the laws of Whist, or to place each decision as a rider under its own particular law, and every such decision should be final.
Questions of strict law should never have been submitted to an arbitrator at all; they should have been cleared up long ago by the legislators themselves; though important, they are not very numerous, and as they have been well threshed out, and all their difficulties are known, the entire matter might be completed in a few hours. Why should London wait?
The constitution of Whist and the constitution of our beloved country are both at the mercy of a grand old man of exuberant verbosity, each of whom is able, in some extraordinary way, to persuade himself that the side of any question on which he happens to be looking, is not only the right side, but that it positively has no other, in spite of the fact that in previous stages of his existence, he has himself, both recognised and vehemently supported that other side.
For twelve years our despot—a despotism worse than Russian, which is tempered by assassination—has had no rival near the throne; for five he has absolutely had nobody even to contradict him, and what is the upshot? Why this: