CHAPTER THE FIRST A Brief Discussion of the Origin of Clubs, with some detailed Reference to the Growth of "Political Clubs" in this Country-The State of the Democratic Party in the Summer of 1865-The actual Beginning of the Manhattan Club-Patriotic Motives of the Founders. ETWEEN the public dining-tables of what we call the ancient world and the organized clubs of modern society, many centuries intervene. Coming down from the group clubs of Athens and Sparta through the ages, we traverse a wide but not a variegate territory, passing the circuli, or confraternities, where Cicero found such good company and conversation, and of which Plutarch has left us details that prove their laws to have been similar to the club rules of to-day; the old tavern and coffee-house clubs of England; the Jacobin clubs of France and America; and, finally, the far-reaching, all-pervading contemporary clubs, which, according to Austin Leigh's Club Directory of 1910, embrace three thousand English-speaking clubs in all parts of the world, with nineteen hundred and three in non-English-speaking countries. "Man," Addison tells us, "is a social animal," naïvely adding that when two or three of these "animals" find them selves in agreement, they form a club. He further proceeds to say that since the points upon which most men agree are food and drink, the founders of the clubs, so organized, look carefully to choice viands and rare wines. Dr. Johnson declares the club to be "an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions." Both were right. The most careful study of club life goes to demonstrate that the club dinner, whether evolved from the Attic feasts sung by Archestratus, or the cooking-schools of epicurean Rome and onward down to that of the Manhattan Club, described by Mr. Julius J. Lyons (whose ice-cream, he declared, was so superior to the ice-cream of Delmonico's, then just over the way from the club-house,-to be told by Judge Henry Wilder Allen that the Manhattan had bought that very ice-cream from that very Delmonico's), the ingredients and the chefs, have been the best the time and the town had to offer. The "certain conditions" of Dr. Johnson have varied, however, under different demands and expediencies, and it is due to their broadening and amplification that such numbers of clubs, representing every avenue of modern development along lines of politics, letters, art, business, recreation and social life, are now in existence. The earliest of all the clubs, the groups of Athens, had for their "certain conditions" only Addison's requirement of food and drink, their incentive the desire of some fifteen or twenty congenial spirits to enjoy one another's society about a common dining-table. Admission to each table was by ballot, one black ball defeating. Elected, the newcomer was required to observe the established rules on pain of expulsion. The pioneer clubman of note seems to have been Themistocles, his successor being Cimon, son of Mithridates, who took the next step in club progress by organizing certain of these casual groups of co-operative diners into a select and |