Pall Mall Luxury Lord Parmoor has resigned his membership of
the Athenaeum on the ground that "at this time a club subscription is an unnecessary luxury expenditure,' and either Lord Parmoor or the Athenaeum has com- municated that intelligence to the Press. Clubs are most of them in difficulties to-day, for many members who are very far from sharing Lord Parmoor's view are being compelled by hard necessity to make unwel- come economies, and the saving of a club subscription is one of them. But is a club subscription an unnecessary luxury ? That depends no doubt on the club, and how the club is used. For the man who can always be located in the card-room or at the billiard-table there may be no great mental or moral loss in cutting the club subscription off. But where do, or can, men of all walks of life, in business, in politics, in literature, in administra- tion, meet to exchange ideas and broaden minds and sympathies as they have for generations at the great historic London clubs ? Was it nothing to sit and listen to Sir Walter Scott at Lord Parmoor's own Athenaeum or to Charles James Fox and his astonishing circle at Brooks's ? Resignation from a club like the Athe- naeum may have to be faced by many of its members as a profoundly regrettable necessity. But a man must have been strangely blind to what club-life has to offer if he can characterize club subscriptions generally as luxury expenditure even at this time of stress.
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