American periodicals are so well represented on the reading-room table
as are English periodicals in every club in New York. Yet there is
assuredly no dearth of interesting weekly papers in America, some
connected with daily papers, others independent. It may be said that
they are not taken at English clubs because they would not be read. If
so, the more's the pity; but I do not think it is so; for this is a case
in which supply would beget demand. At any rate, there must be numbers
of people in London who would be glad to keep fairly in touch with
American life, if they could do so without too much trouble. Why should
there not be an Anglo-American social club, organised with the special
purpose of bringing America home (in a literal sense) to London and
England? Why should not (say) the Century Club of New York be reproduced
in London, with American periodicals as fully represented in its
news-room and reading-room as are English periodicals in an American
club of the first rank? Interest in and sympathy with America would be
the implied condition of membership; and by a judiciously-devised system
of non-resident membership, American visitors to London would be enabled
to read their home newspapers in greater comfort than at the existing
American reading-rooms, and would, moreover, come into easy contact with
sympathetically-minded Englishmen, to their mutual pleasure and profit.
Such a club might, in process of time, become a potent factor in
international relations, and form a new bond of union, of quite
appreciable strength, between the two countries.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote G: I had read or been told that the tip system did not obtain
in America, except in the case of negroes and waiters. A very few days
in New York undeceived me. I went twice to a barber's shop in the