It is not on first sight very obvious how the appointment of a statesman to the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland can have an intimate bearing on the history of the game of golf. Nevertheless that appointment, in the year 1886, of Mr. Arthur Balfour had, in my humble judgment, an important influence and bearing on the game. It so happened that about this time an eminent weekly journal had propounded the statement that none but stupid people played golf, and even that the successful playing of golf demanded, as an essential condition, that the player should be stupid and destitute of all imagination and of all intellectual interests. It was rather an extravagant statement. At the same time also the office of the Irish Secretary was invested with a peculiar importance in the public eye. It was not long after the tragic affair in the Phoenix Park. Ireland was seething with murderous discontent. The man who accepted the secretaryship took his life in his hand with that acceptance, and this risk Mr. Balfour took with all his characteristic coolness and courage. He became at once, both on this account and because of his record as a still rather untried statesman, as a "philosophic doubter" and as a distinguished figure in a certain set of Society to which the name of "Souls" had been rather foolishly given, perhaps the most popular figure in politics. The public eye was upon him and it was known that this man of so many and so varied gifts was an enthusiastic golfer. He went round the links as an object lesson to contradict the unfortunate pronouncement of the aforesaid respectable paper about the stupidity essential to the man who would confess himself a golfer.