Life, 1914-09-03 · page 31 of 48
Life — September 3, 1914 — page 31: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains a satirical essay on golf's rise in English society, attributed to Arthur Balfour's influence as a fashionable statesman. The author argues Balfour—an aristocrat who *looked* like an aristocrat—made golf fashionable among the middle class by accident. The essay criticizes Balfour's other policies, notably the "Coercion Act" (Irish repression), lumping golf and tyranny together as his twin legacies. **The cartoon** (captioned "When Mermaids Become Suffragettes") shows a barber apologizing to a customer for a mix-up involving "Professor Bunny," depicted as an absent-minded academic. The joke appears to satirize absent-minded intellectuals, though the suffragette reference in the title suggests this may be commenting on contemporary women's rights activism—likely implying reformers are as scatterbrained as the professor. The page mixes political critique with gentle mockery of social pretension and academic types.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
399 plexity, the cause can be found. Golf in England is the game of the new peers; that is, the elderly business men. Mr. Balfour was exactly fitted to make it fashionable because, by an unpre- cedented coincidence, he not only was an aristocrat, but looked like one. I shall be misunderstood if I say he was a gentleman but also a stage gentle- man: yet it contains something of the truth. The few men who really look like aristocrats generally turn out to be actors; and the still fewer men who really are aristocrats often look like under-gardeners. When the two things are really combined by accident it is a terrible temptation to the tender hearts of the middle class, That was the first factor that seduced us into golf. The second, I think, was this. The ofd gentry had sports which involved at least a detailed knowledge of the countrysides in which they had been WHEN MERMAIDS BECOME SUFFRAGETTES brought up. Fox hunters did not ride over corn; or rather they did not do (Continued on page 406.) potting, drugging, salting, saddling, bridling, catching on gummy paper, pinning to a cork, or whatever one does to a walrus. But to return to golf. I think it became fashionable in England when Mr. Arthur Bal- four became the fashion. He was (and is) a man with really strong brains and not a little serious patriot- ism; but these better qualities were poisoned by good birth, good taste, elegant manners, a university educa- tion, a charming country residence and all such things that can play the devil with a man. He introduced golf about the same time as he introduced the Coercion Act; and very bad, tyrannical things they both of them were. I speak without malice, for at the time I was too young to be put in an Irish prison, but too old to play golf ; which I have then and since regarded as an expensive way of playing marbles. The Coercion Act has been repealed; and Mr. Balfour is more likely to intro- duce a Home Rule Bill, as long as he is allowed to call it something else. But we have not yet succeeded in re- pealing golf. For this mysterious omission there must evidently be some cause, however complex, and indeed Barber: 1 GUESS 17 WAS PROFESSOR BUNNY WHO TOOK YOUR HAT RY MISTAKE, I think that, without too much com- SIR. HE'S KIND 0’ ABSENT-MINDED