greatly to the New York club member who is airing his weekly
grievance by drawing up a petition, or writing a scorching letter a day
to the House Committee.

If you will listen to the Manhattanite of the older generation, you are
likely to derive the impression that club life in New York is a matter
of the last half-century at most. He is rather inclined to fleer at any
pretension to American club life of earlier date. In one sense he is
right. The club as we know it now is essentially a British institution
modelled on British lines. More and more is the British idea being
carried to the extreme, until we are associating club life with the vast
club-house of spacious lounges and marble swimming pools, and a cuisine
rivalling that of one of the great new hotels. The Fifth Avenue club of
half a century ago had little magnificence as we now understand the
word. It was a simpler and more limited hospitality that was offered to
the friend or the distinguished stranger from overseas. Yet that
hospitality must have had a rare flavour and atmosphere. There must have
been something about it that went far to make up for mere material
deficiencies, if we are to credit the verdicts of those who were in a
position to compare American club life with club life in England and on
the Continent. Thackeray was as fine a judge of the matter as any man
who ever strutted through St. James's Park and scowled back at the
Barnes Newcomeses and Captain Heavysideses in the club windows along
Pall Mall, and there was what he said and wrote about the Century.

It was in the middle of the sixth decade of the last century that the
clubs began to find their way into Fifth Avenue. One of the first was
the Union Club. Writing of that organization in 1906, M. Charles Huard,
in "New York comme je l'ai vu," volunteered the puzzling information
that it was "_fonde en 1836 par les descendants de Knickerbocker, le
plus vieux donc des grand clubs de New York_." If the Frenchman was to
be taken literally he apparently regarded the offspring of Washington
Irving's creation as an exceedingly prolific race. The Union, in 1855,
moved from Broadway near Fourth Street into a house on the northwest
corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. That home, which the
Union occupied until fifteen or twenty years ago, was described as "a
superb structure which cost three hundred thousand dollars." It was the
first building erected in the city solely for club purposes. Al