DO WE SURRENDER RIGHTS?

These considerations apart – and they are mainly concerned with executive action – there remains the wider aspect, of importance to all lawn tennis players in this country, as to whether it is judicious for the British Association “to relinquish its right to make or amend the laws of the game,”.

If British lawn tennis players were sceptical three years ago about handing over the rules of the game, lock, stock, and barrel, to an organisation which has its headquarters in Paris, they ought, it seems to me, to pause now before they give irrevocable consent to the same abrogation. More especially ought they to hesitate when they remember that their interests in this vital matter are protected by the same councillors who, before the war, made the fatal blunder of accepting from the Continentals “world’s titles” which have since provoked so much bother with our American friends. It may be possible, eleven years afterwards, to amend a decision which was never really sanctioned by the general body of players in this country, and the character of which was an innovation foreign to our amateur traditions; if we once surrender the right to make our own laws we shall never be able to regain it. Never again will it be possible for an annual general meeting, held in London, to negative any new rule to which the majority of our players may take a valid objection. The new rule will be considered, probably in Paris, and our delegates, however insistent they may be, can be out-voted by other countries.

Happily, there is yet time for the extraordinary general meeting to vote against this innovation. If the veto be not imposed we shall virtually admit that our players of the present do not possess the same physical reserve as our players of the past. Such an admission would be derogatory to our national pride.