[CHAPTER XXXI.]
It was a great night at the Wilberforce Club, and the members mustered in force. Numbers were unable to obtain admission, and the spaces outside the room in which the club held its meetings were thronged by working-men and lads, many of them members of the Wilberforce. These, although disappointed at being shut out, did not give vent to their feelings in the shape of grumbling, but good-humoredly accepted the position, and split themselves into convenient knots for the purposes of discussion.
The Wilberforce was a working-man's club, similar in its nature and aims to the numerous institutions of a like character which exist in the centres of labor in all the great towns and cities of the kingdom. It commenced with small beginnings, the original number of members being twelve, who met weekly at the lodgings of one or the other for the purpose of discussing political matters affecting themselves. A very short time passed before others made application to be allowed to join the band of twelve, and then the idea was formed of organizing a working-man's club, to be called the Wilberforce. The originator of this movement was a man of strong opinions, by trade a carpenter. He was a ready orator, and he ruled over his followers by force of this gift, as well as by the superior knowledge he possessed of the movements of the age in which he lived. It may not be uninteresting to place upon record a report of the meeting at which the club may have said to have been born.
By consent of a licensed victualler it was held in a room in the "Three Jolly Butcher Boys," a noted public-house in the neighborhood. There were some thirty persons present, all humble, earnest, hard-working laborers in different crafts. Mr. Bartholomew, the carpenter and initiator of the movement, elected himself into the chair.
"We are only a scattered body as yet," he said, "and none of us has the proper authority to propose and second a chairman, so by your leave--" He moved to the head of the table and seated himself. Drawing out his two-foot rule he used it as a mace to rap the table.
"A dozen of us," he said, rising to his feet when all the others were seated and silent, "have been meeting for a little while past at one place and another, with a notion that opening our minds to each other wouldn't do any harm. That has been proved; it has done good. There ain't one of the dozen who don't understand the rights and wrongs of things better than he did before. Now, this was no hole-and-corner affair, and as it's got about, and as there's a wish of a good many others to join us, why, I say, 'Join us and welcome.'"
There was a murmur of approval, and a general rapping of knuckles and scraping of feet on the part of the original eleven.
"The more the merrier, I say," continued Mr. Bartholomew. "What we are working for, or what we are going to work for, is the general good of all alike--in a fair way, mind! Nothing wrong, nothing violent--"
"Hear, hear," from the auditors.
"Everything constitutional. When my wife doesn't agree with me, I don't knock her down, as brutes do, I argue with her; if that don't make her agree with me, I keep on arguing with her; and if she's that obstinate that she won't agree with me even then, I go on arguing with her; and the upshot of it is that I fairly wear her down, and in the end she's bound to agree with me."