Of course the best known of the Greenwich magazines is The Masses, owned by Max Eastman and edited by Floyd Dell.  It has, in a sense, grown beyond the Village, inasmuch as it now circulates all over the country, wherever socialistic or anarchistic tendencies are to be found.  But its inception was in Greenwich Village, and in its infant days it strongly reflected the radical, young, insurgent spirit which was just beginning to ferment in the world below Fourteenth Street.  In those days it was poor and struggling too (as is altogether fitting in a Village paper) and lost nothing in freshness and spontaneity and vigour from that fact.

“You might tell,” said Floyd Dell, with a twinkle, “of the days when The Masses was in Greenwich Avenue, and the editor, the business manager and the stenographer played ball in the street all day long!”

It is, perhaps, symbolic that The Masses in moving uptown stopped at Fourteenth Street, the traditional and permanent boundary line.  There it may reach out and touch the great world, yet still remain part of the Village where it was born.

Here is one man’s views of the Liberal Club.  I am half afraid to quote them, they sound so heretical, but I wish to emphasise the fact that they are quoted.  They might be the snapping of the fox at the sour grapes for all I know!  Though this particular man seemed calm and dispassionate.  “The Liberal Club Board,” he said, “is a purely autocratic institution.  It is collectively a trained poodle, though composed of nine members.  The procedure is to make a few long speeches, praise the club, and re-elect the Board.  Perfectly simple.  But—­did you say Liberal Club?” He used to sit on the Board himself, too!

A visiting Scotch socialist proclaimed it, without passion, a “hell of a place,” and some of its most striking anarchistic leaders, “vera interestin’ but terrible damn fools”!  But he was, doubtless, an eccentric though an experienced and dyed-in-the-wool socialist who had lectured over half the globe.  It is recorded of him that once when a certain young and energetic Village editor had been holding forth uninterruptedly and dramatically for an hour on the rights of the working-man, etc., etc., the visiting socialist, who had been watching his fervent gesticulations with absorbed attention, suddenly leaned forward and seized the lapel of his coat.

“Mon!” he exclaimed earnesly, “do ye play tennis?”

Just what is the Liberal Club?

You may have contradictory answers commensurate with the number of members you interrogate.  One will tell you that it is a fake; one that it is the only vehicle of free speech; Arthur Moss says it is “the most il-liberal club in the world”!  Floyd Dell says it is paramountly a medium for entertainment, and that it is “not so much a clearing house of new ideas as of new people”!

The Liberal Club goes up, and the Liberal Club goes down.  It has its good seasons and its bad, its fluctuations as to standards and favour, its share in the curious and inevitable tides that swing all associations back and forth like pendulums.