made to the coffee-bar. The chairman exchanged a few words with us, again extending an invitation; which we again accepted; then he excused himself, as being responsible for the whole club, much of which had had to look after itself that evening. We screwed up our courage and entered into conversation with the planist. Oh, yes, she did a good deal of this kind of thing in the winter, mostly at publichouses. No, it was not pleasant for girls, but her mother usually accompanied her, and, besides, it brought in money. She worked all day long at dressmaking, to which she was apprenticed. She had learned to play the piano when father was alive, and now it came in handy. Yes, she got very tired of it sometimes; most people did not seem to think that piano-playing was exhausting work. No, thank you, she would not have any coffee. Goodnight, sir.

We stole away before the second part of the concert, the chorus of some wellknown song tinkling faintly behind us. That afternoon we had listened to a violinist of European fame; somehow the audience at St. James's Hall did not take their pleasure quite so heartily as the audience of The Lane that night!

Our next visit was timed to fall on a debating night. There was to be a discussion upon "The State and the Liquor Traffic," which promised sport. Under a misapprehension of the hour at which the meeting was to commence we arrived fully half an hour too early, and we were wondering how to occupy the unexpected interval when two boys, apparently some fifteen or sixteen years of age, entered the coffee bar. We stared, for we had been under the impression that the club was reserved for men; yet here were two youngsters looking as if the whole place belonged to them. Inquiries addressed to a bystander elicited the in

formation that there was a boys' club under the same roof, certain rooms at the top of the house being reserved for the "Junior side." Curiosity was piqued, and curiosity had to be satisfied. The bystander was impressed into service, and led us up certain winding and ill-lighted staircases till the evidence of our ears assured us that we were approaching the boys' domain, Our escort opened a door gingerly, and said, "In here, sir"; then he suddenly fled. His flight was not a moment too early. A youth had perceived him, raised a yell, "No seniors allowed up here!" and flung a well-aimed indiarubber-soled shoe at the departing figThere was a buzz as of wasps in a disturbed nest, and half a dozen mischievous urchins swarmed out to protect the sanctity of their club. For a moment we wished that we were out of bowshot; but the tumult subsided as quickly as it had arisen when the discovery was made that no senior, but only a harmless stranger, was entering the forbidden city. We found ourselves, we hardly knew how, in the possession or under the protection of a lad who appeared to hold a position of authority. "It's like this, sir," he explained; "we aren't allowed in the seniors' rooms, and we take jolly good care that they don't come into ours." Verily, we could believe it!

ure.

At first sight the Junior Club seemed to be a reproduction on a small scale of the men's club. There was a billiard-table, very undersized; there was a bagatelle-table, also undersized; there were tables with dominoes, draughts, and other games scattered all over them; there were chairs in various stages of disruption. Adroit questioning elicited the fact that there were differences as well as resemblances. We learned that no smoking or card playing was allowed on the junior side (our eyes and nose assuring us that the rule was kept); while, on the other

hand, the juniors carried on carpentry in a way and with an energy unknown to the seniors. In proof of this we were proudly shown a bookcase, a nest of cupboards, and other handiwork of the junior carpenters, made under the direction of the only senior whose presence was tolerated in the sacred junior precincts.

"What are those small cupboards for?" we asked. "To keep our running things in," we were told. "Where do you run?" "In the streets." Curiosity was again aroused, and again satisfied. We learned that as soon as darkness fell about twenty boys would, on most evenings, crowd into a dressing-room (dressing-cupboard rather--it was only some eight feet long by three feet wide), change into running costume, and go for a two or three mile run through the streets. The police did not interfere with the runners so long as the runners did not interfere with the traffic. The thing seemed incredible, and we were privately resolving to verify our information at more trustworthy sources when the door was flung open and ten or a dozen mud-bespattered figures in the last stages of panting and perspiration flocked into the dressing-room and sat down to rest awhile before dressing.

It began to dawn upon us that there seemed to be no one in charge of the place. There was no disorder, but there was no visible reason why disorder should not spring up, and we pursued our inquiries in this direction. "Who looks after the juniors?" "Oh! we look after ourselves when Mr.

is away.

gives us the choice of being turned out for the rest of the evening or of having one of the senior committee to look after us; and we go out. But there is very seldom any real noise, excepting if one of the footballs gets loose, and then it sometimes breaks a window. Then there is trouble."

A hasty glance at our watch told us that it was time to descend to the debate; but we resolved to see more of this boys' club, for, candidly, we did not believe that the boys had yet been invented who could keep quiet for long by themselves-especially if there were footballs within reach.

...

were

In the room used for debating purposes five-and-twenty men were assembled, all smoking hard. A stranger presided, and just as we entered called upon the opener to deliver his address on "The State and the Liquor Traffic." The speaker was a working man, and we anticipated the usual teetotal claptrap, with the old finale of "champagne at night, real ," but we agreeably surprised. "The difficulties caused by the liquor traffic, Mr. Chairman," he began, “have a long history behind them. The first brewer that we know of was Noah, who very soon discovered the evil character of the drink which he had invented." By this we were all attention, and we listened in amazement to a long speech, always fluent, sometimes even eloquent, constantly humorous, ranging through many centuries, wandering all over the world, with apt Shakespearean quotations and police-court statistics. Suddenly the speaker grappled with his main point. He dismissed the Russian Government spirit monopoly and the Scandinavian system with a few words of condemnation, and then he turned to prohibition. The State of Maine was evidently his earthly paradise, and prohibition his ideal law. Arguments and facts that might be thrust against him by subsequent speakers he anticipated

and ridiculed, always ingeniously, if not always ingenuously. A fine peroration on the blessedness of a sober land brought a most remarkable speech to an end. The burst of cheering which greeted its close was a well-earned tribute to a splendid effort. We wondered if the debate would be maintained at this high level, but were hardly surprised to find that it was not. Nevertheless a high standard of intelligence was displayed. The pet fallacies in fact and reasoning which the opener had glided over, like the skater on ice that hardly bears him, were dragged to the light of day and well punished, but no one reached his level of oratory. We were chiefly impressed by the selfcontrol of the speakers (not one of them said a thing about another which had better have been left unsaid—an unusual trait in a debating society), and by the intelligent grasp of the subject which most of the speakers possessed. We found that we had a good deal to think over when the evening was at an end, and we were on our homeward way, and we wondered whether the eminent King's Counsel who was the advertised lecturer for the next week would rival that Covent Garden porfer in eloquence.

One night it chanced that we found ourselves almost alone in the club library with the man who opened the debate to which reference has been made. A friendly remark about the weather led naturally to a mild disqui. sition on politics and various other objects of interest. We gently diverted the conversation to the subject of the club, for we were anxious to discover a working man's point of view, and how the whole thing struck this particular contemporary. During the chat one or two of the younger members dropped in, and the talk became general. The impressions of their impres

sions which we gathered from this talk round the fire are a little difficult to put into connected form, partly be cause their mental attitude differed somewhat from our own, and partly because we had an uneasy feeling that some of them were either guarding their tongues in the presence of a comparative stranger, or else were unaccustomed to self-analysis. However, we present here the general drift of the discussion, and the working man's point of view so far as we could grasp it.

There are, it would appear, two great forces working for evil in the social system. One is the public-house; the other, class division, with resulting antipathy, suspicion, and enmity. The public-house is essentially evil and incapable of reform, because all who are, directly or indirectly, interested in the liquor trade are necessarily interested in increasing the consumption of an injurious article. Moreover, man is a gregarious animal; also, the working man works hard and lives under depressing conditions. Therefore publichouses will continue to be patronized till some better place of meeting and recreation is provided. It would be best to close all public-houses by Act of Parliament, or at the least to grant local option. Failing this, there is a little hope in the new scheme of "the reformed public-house," and more in the multiplication of good workingmen's clubs on temperance lines. Το the so-called social clubs for working men where intoxicating liquor is sold no mercy should be shown. "They are perfect hells. More men are ruined by them than by even the worst of the pubs. You go round to Street next Sunday morning at about ten o'clock, and you'll see 'em reeling home." At present it must be sadly confessed there is little hope of Parliament doing anything. "What can you expect," chimed in a young enthusiast, "when

the House of Lords is composed almost entirely of brewers?"

At

As to the other social evil-class divisions-that would hardly be stamped out in our time. Nevertheless, the signs of the future were hopeful. Such a club as this, where gentlemen and working men met on terms of equality, was capable of working miracles. this point we set ourselves to find out the basis on which the club in question rested. Hitherto we had been content with a vague idea that it was a sort of parochial club, but we now learned that it expressed the philanthropic efforts of an influential section of one of the learned professions. Most of the leading men of the profession co-operated for this purpose and financed the institute, set the clergyman whom I had seen to organize it, induced younger men with more leisure to come and identify themselves with its working and welfare-in short, expressed the best side of themselves and of their profession in this concrete form. We did not investigate the matter to its depths, partly because there were other problems to be solved, and partly because the men themselves did not seem absolutely clear as to all the details. So we turned the conversation back to the more general aspects of the social question, and here we discovered an interesting difference of opinion. The older men, before whose eyes the movement which, for want of a better term, may be called "Social Christianity" had grown up, who had known either from experience or from their fathers the social conditions of the middle of last century, were deeply impressed by the new order of things. The younger men, who had grown up in the midst of things as they are, were inclined to take everything as a matter of course. They could not remember, for example, a time when there were no clubs and other meeting-grounds of rich and poor, and they regarded the

social movement as being quite in the natural order of things. One or two fervent spirits had their eyes fixed ou the future, and their ideas were મી strange mixture of sensible desire for real progress and definite reforms with ill-digested rubbish gorged from foolish periodicals and swallowed uncritically. One or two were inclined to regard their wealthier friends as existing chiefly for the purpose of providing prizes for sports. This at once roused an older man's indignation. "It's quite right and fair," he said, "that out of their riches they should give us a decent house for a club. But I don't hold with bleeding them. If we can't do something for ourselves, and if we can't follow sport for its own sake, it's a disgusting shame to us. No, what we want them to give us is a share of their education, and opportunities of widening our minds."

Then the talk shifted to the recent history of "The Lane." "It isn't what it used to be," said someone. "No," interjected a man in the corner, who had been listening silently. "It's changed above a bit. You remember the old round-house? Perhaps you don't, but it stood where the Buildings are now. There used to be a court off the street there, and none of the coppers would dare go down that court aloneno, nor yet in twos. I've seen it when a toff came strolling up "The Lane'; two of the chaps would begin fighting outside the court, and as likely as not the toff would stop and look on. Then a bit of a crowd would begin to collect round without his noticing it, and they'd edge him nearer and nearer to the court, and all of a sudden they'd hustle him in and drag him into one of the houses-and half an hour after he'd come out half-naked and robbed of every penny-piece! You don't see that now." "No, the County Council's changed all that," strikes in the young enthusiast with the views about