CLUB MORALS.
Jr is a prevalent impression among the uninitiated, that clubs are extremely exclusive. The ballot watches over their purity, and all suspicious characters are rigidly debarred. The proprietor of a re- tail-shop is doubted—he may have contracted habits of lax morality in setting off damaged goods to advantage, and even a club insti- tuted in support of Democratic and Equalizing principles will shut its doors in his face. Solicitors are reluctantly admitted : the W— is only known to have admitted one, and that mainly be- cause, despising modern euphuism, he had the moral courage to write himself down "attorney-at-law." Yet, even in spite of the watchful vigilance of the cherub in shape of a ballot-box who guards the portals of these Edens, strange characters do slip in. JOSHUA JONES ASHLEY does not appear to stand quite alone in his appro- priative propensities. " We have occasionally missed a stray book, or so, from the club," said one of the witnesses against him ; "but when that happens, a motion is stuck up requesting the member to return it : it then rests with the Committee whether the member shall or shall not be expelled." The reader will see at once that " the club" here spoken of cannot be the Athenwum ; its literary members would regard book-stealing as plagiarism, and treat it less leniently. But "the club" in question reserved its indigna- tion for the stealing of silver forks—that offence was the luckless member's " furculm Caudinse " : modern heroes, who are in nowise startled at the appropriation of "a book or so," regard the epithet " furcifer " in the same light as did the heroes of old Rome. Mr. JONES, who as a member of the Athenteutn has probably a literary turn, must, out of question, belong to "the silver fork school." He seems to have been everywhere a welcome guest, and to have levied his contributions with the most laudable impar- tiality. The Junior United Service and the Army and Navy—the Carlton and the Reform—the Athenwum and the Erectheium—the Colonial and the Union—into all of them did this social cosmopolite find his way. Of four clubs in Pall Mall, linked end to end like a rope of onions, only one seems to have escaped him : since the affair of Lord DE Roos it has not been so easy to play "tricks upon Travellers." The most trifling art can be rendered important by being carried on upon a great scale. Pocketing silver spoons and forks sounds at first like a petty larceny kind of offence ; but when the offender is at the expense of paying an annual subscrip- tion to so many clubs to obtain opportunities of committing it, the wholesale plunder requisite to render such an outlay profitable be- wilders the imagination with its magnificence. The scene in the Central Criminal Court, when "sixteen pawnbrokers were called, each of whom produced from four to two-and-a-half dozen of silver table-spoons and forks, which were identified by the secre- taries of the respective clubs, and handed over to the owners," must have been imposing in the extreme. Nothing like it has occurred in modern times, except the arrival of the Sycee silver at the Mint—only there will be no restitution of the plunder in that ease. The exposure of the propensities of Mr. JOSHUA JONES ASHLEY must have left an unpleasant sense of mutual dis- trust among the members of clubs. Nay, worse : until he was found out, all the servants in the clubs were eyed with suspicion ; now the tables are turned, and the servants will distrust their mas- ters, to a man. In private families, the butler will, keep a sharp eye on his plate whenever any person suspected of belonging to a club is invited to dinner. It is an old and true saying, that rogues are generally fools. Mr. JONES was found not guilty when he only took the spoons of a club of which he was a member : that was merely "doing what he liked with his own"; a master could not rob his own servant of the plate intrusted to his charge. He might have taken as many spoons from the clubs of which he was a mem- ber as he pleased; the Committee might have deliberated " whe- ther he shall or shall not be expelled," but the Judge and Jury would have pronounced him no thief. But the blockhead must needs go poaching on other men's preserves, and pocketing the spoons of a club where he had only the entree.
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