1832.] An Attack upon the Clubs ! 35 



the bachelor becomes odd, old-fashioned, and churlish, for want of the 

 polishing influences of female society, so will the seclusion from general 

 male companionship entail similar vices upon the professional clubbist. 

 So much for his chances of mental improvement ! 



And will his heart fare any better than his head ? Let us see. It is 

 flagrant that a corporation, or company of any sort, is always ten times 

 more narrow-minded and illiberal than an individual. That which a 

 member, in his personal capacity, would blush to propose, he scruples 

 not to advocate on behalf of his guild In this respect, corporate mora- 

 lity is about as pure as state policy ; names and numbers are presumed 

 to sanction every thing ; but can any one become an agent in such dirty 

 work without eventual contamination ? Can the individual lend him- 

 self to the little cabals, intrigues, and sordid interests of the club, with- 

 out distorting his own views of right and wrong, and becoming person- 

 ally, as well as corporately, selfish. .A regular clubbist, if he have a 

 friend low down upon the list for admission, will not hesitate, as I am 

 credibly informed, to black-ball all those above him, however unobjec- 

 tionable, or even unknown, in order to give precedence and immediate 

 election to the favoured party. Is it honourable, is it honest, thus to 

 fix an unmerited stigma upon strangers, from a motive which, however it 

 may be disguised under the veil of friendship, cannot be termed other 

 than corrupt ? It may be club-law, and common law but it ought not 

 to be the law of gentlemen. These, and the thousand other tortuous 

 finesses and manoeuvrings, which the member is accustomed to practise, 

 either for the interest of himself or his brotherhood together with the 

 gossiping, whispering, and backbiting to which such a system must 

 inevitably give rise can hardly exercise any very beneficial influence 

 upon the heart of the participants. 



" But what say you," methinks I hear the reader exclaim, {C to the 

 great social advantage to be derived from these assemblages ?" I say 

 there is no such advantage none whatever. If a man can enrol himself 

 in a club of twelve or fifteen hundred members for the sake of society, he 

 may, with as good a chance of succeeding in that object, enlist in the 

 army. No individual pretends to an acquaintance with the whole mob 

 of his ballotted brethren, nor with a half, nor even with a tithe. He 

 knows, or desires to see, but a few; and these few, dining at various 

 hours or different tables, and frequenting the club on uncertain days, he 

 can only hope to meet by some rare and fortunate coincidence. But 

 even if he knew them all, so far as the professional and exclusive clubs 

 are concerned (and they are all, more or less, so), his chances of pleasant 

 companionship would only be diminished by the enlargement of his 

 acquaintance ; not because the bores of all sorts, who stand no chance of 

 invitations in general society, invariably take refuge by whole droves in 

 the different clubs but that, by the very constitution of every such 

 guild, its brethren must necessarily be centrifugal, rather than centri- 

 petal. If faith be due to the vulgar adage, that two of a trade can never 

 agree, the dictum must be equally true of a thousand more, especially when 

 thus thrown together to compare in their own minds their respective 

 merits and advancement in their common profession. The success of 

 the few can only have been obtained at the expense of the many ; and 

 the rivalship and envy, the heartburning and bitterness, which might 

 have slumbered in the absence of the objects by which those feelings have 

 been provoked, are here awakened and inflamed by their perpetual pre- 



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