At a few clubs there are still some curious and rather unmeaning restrictions.  A particularly absurd rule that maintains its ground here and there, is that which forbids smoking in the library of a club.  What more appropriate place could there be for the thoughtful consumption of tobacco than among the books?  But after due allowance has been made for a few minor restrictions of this kind, the fact remains that smoking has triumphed socially all along the line in Clubland.  We have travelled far from the days when a committee man could declare that “No Gentleman smoked,” to the time when, for example, the large smoking-room at Brooks’s is one of the finest rooms in one of the most famous and exclusive of clubs.  This splendid room in the eighteenth-century days of gambling was the “Grand Subscription Room”—­the gambling room of Georgian times.  It still retains two of the old gaming tables.  Now this magnificent apartment, with its splendid barrelled ceiling, which a well-known architectural writer, Mr. Stanley C. Ramsey, A.R.I.B.A., describes as “probably the finest room of its kind in London,” is the temple of Saint Nicotine.  The strangers’ smoking-room in the same club, formerly the dining-room, is another beautiful and delightfully decorated apartment.  Similar transformations have been witnessed in other clubs.

Barry’s original plan for the Travellers’ Club, erected in 1832, shows no smoking-room on the ground floor.  It was probably some inconvenient apartment of no account.  The early “Travellers” did smoke, for Theodore Hook, satirizing them and the club rule that no person was eligible as a member who had not travelled out of the British Islands to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a direct line, wrote: 

The travellers are in Pall Mall, and smoke cigars so
cosily,
And dream they climb the highest Alps, or rove the
plains of Moselai,
The world for them has nothing new, they have explored
all parts of it;
And now they are club-footed! and they sit and look at
charts of it.

The present-day smoking-room at the Travellers’ is a noble apartment, which was originally the coffee-room.  It occupies the whole of the ground-floor front to the gardens of Carlton House Terrace, and is divided into three bays by the projection of square piers.

Another sign of the complete change which has come over the attitude of most folk towards tobacco is to be seen in the permission of smoking at meetings of committees and councils, where not so long ago such an indulgence would have been regarded as an outrage.  Many of the committees of municipal councils and other public bodies now permit smoking while business is proceeding.  It has even become usual for members of the House of Commons to smoke in committee rooms when the sitting is private; and cigars and cigarettes and pipes are now lighted in the lobby the moment that the House has risen.  A very thin line thus