And now, having poured a broadside of abuse into the old stance, let us attack the new or open stance.

The gravamen of the charge against it is that it causes the club to be taken up too vertically, the swing to be too 'straight up and down.' In this charge there is truth if, and as I venture to think only if, the open stance is exaggerated. What of course constitutes exaggeration is a question which may be asked, and can be best answered by indicating what is not exaggeration. It may safely be said that to have the right foot three or four inches in front of that imaginary line of ours comes within the limit of strict moderation. Let the reader take a club and, at imminent risk to the chimney ornaments, try the experiment himself. He will find that if the right foot be advanced immoderately, the right leg and shoulder will, if one may say so, get in his way, or, to be precise, in the way of the club, so that his only comfortable plan will be to take up the club more vertically. Also - and I think this is the more important point of the two - he will discover that a much more forcible turn of the body is needed if he is to be in the proper position at the top of the swing, and so there is the greater temptation not to turn the body at all; from this last crime the taking up of the club too straight follows almost inevitably. The moral of this is that the player who adopts the open stance must be very, very careful to keep that right foot within bounds. To be for a moment egotistical, I have sometimes found that with a very decidedly open stance, I can drive with an ease and fire and straightness of which I did not believe myself capable - for a while. It may be for a few shots, or a whole round, or, and this is sadly rare, for a whole day, but there always comes a breakdown, due, no doubt, to a gradual exaggeration of the successful stance, and that breakdown is the worst of the many kinds to which I have been a martyr. At length I have learnt wisdom on this one point, and if in the hour of my affliction a kind friend makes the suggestion that I should stand more open, my invariable reply to him is, 'Get thee behind me.' I know he is only tempting me to a worse fall.

From the fact that two equally eminent golfers have written that the open stance (1) impedes and (2) facilitates the art of following through, a cynical reader might draw the conclusion that in this particular regard it has no effect whatever. My own experience, for what it is worth, is that it is easier to follow through when standing open. The fact that the player is already facing, in a slight degree, in the direction in which he means to drive, seems to allow club, arms, and body to go forward more easily in that direction. Indeed, in that word body there lurks a hidden danger; it is fatally easy to lurch forward with the body instead of standing still, so that Braid says that ' the chief danger of the open stance is the tendency which undoubtedly exists to put the body into the stroke too soon. The body seems to want to get in almost as soon as the club begins the down-swing, and when the player is a little off his game it is constantly getting there before the club.'

The reader may by now have discovered for himself the advice to which all this argument has tended, namely, that he should avoid the error of either party by adopting a stance that shall be as far as possible square. Let the right foot be three or four inches in front and not more: let him be for ever watching and praying that this foot does not encroach any further.

According to the stance he adopts, the player will stand more or less behind his ball. He may have the ball almost opposite to his left heel, or to the middle of his body, or further back still almost opposite his right heel. The latter is a phenomenon occasionally to be observed in the styles of those who stand very open, but is not to be imitated. The object to be obtained is, roughly speaking, that 'the ball, club shaft and hands should be all, as nearly as possible, in the same vertical plane.' To this may be added that the getting of the hands in front of the ball is, on the whole, a commoner error even than having them too far behind. Hundreds of thousands of shots are annually mistimed by the hands coming through too soon, and if a man start by having his hands too far in front of the ball, he is surely encouraging himself in this common error. Therefore it seems wise to put the ball as far forward as is comfortably possible, but a few inches behind the left heel. If the player comes to feel that he cannot reach the ball on the down swing without a forward lunge of his body, he may be sure that he has exaggerated yet another virtue into a vice and has got the ball too far forward. This is comparatively rare, however, and a much more frequent and insidious bad habit is that of getting too far in front of the ball. This attitude gives for a while a great sense of power, of being well over the ball, but the ensuing breakdown is nearly always a particularly bad one.

Besides what may be called this main question as regards the stance, there are two or three subsidiary ones, two of which are of so elemental a character that perhaps I should have put them first. They are, first, How far away the player is to stand from the ball; and, secondly, How far his feet are to be apart?

It is a truism to point out that the first question must depend largely on the lie of the club, and that the more upright the club the nearer must the player stand to his ball. There are a few people who, so to speak, flatten the lie of their clubs by holding them in such a way that the heel of the club rests on the ground, while the toe is cocked in the air. One exceedingly sound golfer, Mr. H. S. Colt, has a suspicion of this style about his driving, although it is not so marked as in his putting, wherein only the extreme heel of the club rests upon the ground. One may assert, however, with some boldness that it is not a good plan, that the head should rest on the turf at its natural angle, and that if a man wants to drive like the ' auld wife cuttin' hay ' of Bob Martin, he had better buy a flat club. There are a few who may be seen with only the toe of the club on the ground, a feat accomplished by holding the wrists abnormally high in an attitude of the most exquisite discomfort, but these are almost invariably bad players who may be condemned without any show of respect.