Enough has already been written of the enthusiasm with which the Americans took up the game itself, of the social prestige which it at once obtained, of the colossal sums of money that have been lavished on the making of courses, of the sumptuousness of the club-houses that have sprung up all over the land. That golf is in itself a fascinating game, is sufficiently proved in England, where it has drawn so many thousands of devotees away from cricket, football, lawn tennis, and other sports. But can we imagine what the result might have been if there had been in Great Britain no cricket, or football, or other sports, so that all the game-loving enthusiasm of the nation had been free to turn itself loose into that one channel? And this is just what did happen in America. Golf had a clear field and a strenuous sport-loving nation, devoid of open-air games, at its mercy. The result was not merely that people took to playing golf and that young men neglected their offices and millionaires stretched unwonted muscles in scrambling over bunkers. Golf taught the American people to play games. It took them out from their great office-buildings and from their five-o'clock cocktails at the club, into the open air; and they found that the open air was good. So around nearly every golf club other sports grew up. Polo grounds were laid out by the side of the links, croquet lawns appeared on one side of the club-house and lawn-tennis nets arose on the other, while traps for the clay-pigeon shooters were placed safely off in a corner. Golf came precisely at the moment when the people were ready for it. Just as America, having in a measure completed the exploitation of her own continent and developed a manufacturing power beyond the resources of consumption in her people, was commercially ripe for the invasion of the markets of the world; just as she came, in her overflowing wealth and power, to a recognition of her greatness as a nation, and was politically ripe for an Imperial policy of colonial expansion; just as, tired of the loose code of ethics of the scrambling days, when the country was still one half wilderness and none had time to care for the public conscience, she was morally ripe for the wonderful revival which has set in in the ethics of politics and commerce and of which Mr. Roosevelt has been and is the chief apostle: so, by the individual richness of her citizens, giving larger leisure in which to cultivate other pleasures than those which their offices or homes could afford, she was ripe for the coming of the day of open-air games. And having turned to them, she threw herself into their pursuit with the ardour and singleness of purpose which are characteristic of the people and which, as applied to games, seem to English eyes to savour almost of professionalism. As a matter of fact they are only the manifestations of an essential trait of the American character.