I shall doubtless be reminded that the larger clubs are now generally divided into sections, and that membership in these sections is supposed to be dictated by interest.  This is a step in the right direction, but it is an excessively short one.  The programme, with all its vicious accompaniments and lamentable results, persists.  What I have said and shall say applies as well to an art or a domestic science section as to a club in toto.

To bring down the treatment to a definite prescription, let us suppose that the committee in charge of a club’s activities, instead of marking out a definite programme for the season, should simply announce that communications on subjects of personal interest to the members, embodying some new and original thought, method, idea, device, or mode of treatment, would be received, and that the best of these would be read and discussed before the club, after which some would appear in print.  No conditions would be stated, but it would be understood that such features as length and style, as well as subject matter, would be considered in selecting the papers to be read.  Above all, it would be insisted that no paper should be considered that was merely copied from anything, either in substance or idea.  It is, of course, possible to constitute a paper almost entirely of quotations and yet so to group and discuss these that the paper becomes an original contribution to thought; but mere parrot-like repetition of ascertained facts, or of other people’s thoughts, should not be tolerated.

Right here the first obstacle would be encountered.  Club members, accustomed to be assigned for study subjects like “The Metope of the Parthenon” or “The True Significance of Hyperspace,” will not easily comprehend that they are really desired to put briefly on paper original ideas about something that they know at first hand.  Mrs. Jones makes better sponge cake than any one in town; the fact is known to all her friends.  If sponge cake is a desirable product, why should not the woman who has discovered the little knack that turns failure into success, and who is proud of her ability and special knowledge, tell her club of it, instead of laboriously copying from a book—­or, let us say, from two or three books—­some one else’s compilation of the facts ascertained at second or third hand by various other writers on “The Character of the Cid”?  Why should not Mrs. Smith, who was out over night in the blizzard of 1888, recount lier experiences, mental as well as physical?  Why should not Miss Robinson, who collects coins and differs from the accepted authorities regarding the authenticity of certain of her specimens, tell why and how and all about it?  Why should not the member who is crazy about begonias and the one who thinks she saw Uncle Hiram’s ghost, and she who has read and re-read George Meredith, seeing beauties in him that no one else ever detected—­why should not one and all give their fellows the benefit of the really valuable special knowledge that they have acquired through years of interested thinking and talking and doing?