7. The Game and the Rules - Page 2

yourself and your family. And then to think
that the ground thus tabooed by one particular member may be all
Sutherlandshire, or, still worse, all Westminster! Decidedly, these
rules call for instant revision; and the unprivileged players must be
submissive indeed who consent to put up with them.

Friends and fellow-members, let us cry with one voice, "The links for
the players!"

Once more, just look at the singular rule in our own All England club,
by which certain assorted members possess a hereditary right to veto all
decisions of the elective committee, merely because they happen to be
their fathers' sons, and the club long ago very foolishly permitted the
like privilege to their ancestors! That is an irrational interference
with the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays ventures
to defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-hearted
way (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) by
supposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talk
in the committee of "mending or ending it." It shows the long-suffering
nature of the poor blind players at this compulsory game of national
football that they should ever for one moment permit so monstrous an
assumption--permit the idea that one single player may wield a
substantive voice and vote to outweigh tens of thousands of his
fellow-members!

These questions of procedure, however, are after all small matters. It
is the real hardships of the game that most need to be tackled. Why
should one player be born into the sport with a prescriptive right to
fill some easy place in the field, while another has to fag on from
morning to night in the most uninteresting and fatiguing position? Why
should _pâté de foie gras_ and champagne-cup in the tent be so unequally
distributed? Why should those who have made fewest runs and done no
fielding be admitted to partake of these luxuries, free of charge, while
those who have borne the brunt of the fight, those who have suffered
from the heat of the day, those who have contributed most to the honour
of the victory, are turned loose, unfed, to do as they can for
themselves by hook or by crook somehow? These are the questions some of
us players are now beginning to ask ourselves; and we don't find them
efficiently answered by the bald statement that we "want to play the
game without the rules," and that we ought to be precious glad the
legislators of the club haven't made them a hundred times harder against
us.

No, no; the rules themselves must be altered. Time was, indeed, when
people used to think they were made and ordained by divine authority.
"Cum privilegio" was the motto of the