I say it is not for the sake of this $8.71-1/2 profit of Thoreau’s that we must dig; but rather for that chapter on the bean field in Walden Pond, which proves the real worth of digging. There can hardly be a form of labor so elemental, so all-demanding, so abundantly yielding of the fruits of life, as digging. Yet there are those who doubt the wisdom of digging because things can be bought cheaper at the store; and those who question their right to dig when they can hire a man to dig for them; and there are those who hate to dig, who contemn duty, who, if they plant, will plant a piece of fallow land with golf-balls only, and hoe it with brassies, niblicks, cleeks, and spooners, saying with Chaucer’s Monk: “... how shall the world be servèd? Let Austyn have his swynk to his reservèd.” Golf is an ancient game, no doubt, but not so old as gardening, though golf’s primordial club and vocabulary seem like things long left over, bits of that Missing-Link Period between our arboreal and cave-day past. Except for calling the cows from the meadow, or fighting in war, there is nothing we do that requires words and weapons, tools, instruments, implements, utensils, apparatus, machinery, or mechanisms so lacking in character and comeliness as the words and clubs of golf. The gurglings of infants seem articulate, even to unparental ears, compared with the jargon of golf; and as for billiard-cues, baseball-bats, pikes, spades, shillalahs, and teething-rings, they have the touch of poetry on them; whereas the golf-club was conceived and shaped in utter unimaginativeness. Golf is not an ancient game: it has the mark of the Machine upon it; the Preadamites could not have figured the game out. Gardening, on the other hand, if we trust Holy Writ, was an institution founded before the Fall, incorporated with the social order from the start--an inherent, essential element in the constitution of human things: “Great nature’s _primal_ course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast,” --which civilization doth murder as Macbeth murdered sleep. Golf belongs to civilization strictly, not to the human race, being one of life’s post-Edenic precautions, like psychopathic hospitals, jails, and homes for the feeble-minded. A golf course is a little-wanderers’ home; and if we must have golf courses, let their hazards be carefully constructed on worthless land, and let the Civil Service Board examine the caddies, whether they be fit guards for the golfers, lest some small boy be wasted who might have tended real sheep on Norfolk Downs or have weeded in a garden.