Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/177

 accommodations, all which were successfully realized, chiefly by resigning their catering difficulties to strictly professional hands, and while they advanced also as centres of art and science, I am at present more interested, as to club life, in certain features of social advance which it also presented. A society owes more than, perhaps, it usually thinks or confesses, to the honest straightforward purpose, sound natural feeling, and good common sense of those masses of the people, who, with proper ambition, are ever surging up into its ranks with the world's progress. Thus we have had more just, humane, and suitable laws; and thus, too, we had, in the enlarged society of the twentieth century, an improved public moral sentiment, and improved club life.

Where there is already the predisposition, incidents, small in themselves, may lead to great results, as when a small trigger fires off a huge gun. One of our grand clubs of this time furnished another illustration. An altercation had arisen between two of its members, ending in a personal assault, the assaulting party pleading in defence that he had been provoked by ungentlemanly bearing. The case, famous as it afterwards became, was simply this. The complainant had been accosted, in gay hilarity, by the other, in order to introduce the friend and fellow-member on his arm, who, as he explained, was aspiring to be the very pattern of virtue; for whereas he was wont, in younger and stronger days, to seduce a woman once a month, now that age's infirmities began to tell, he was content with only once a quarter, and by-and-by would be so correct and pure, that