The third committee will be on Name; it will prepare a list of titles to be chosen from.
The fourth committee will be on Program. This will offer possible lines of work.
These committees will be sufficient to begin with. The chairman can then tell when and where the next meeting will be held and declare this one adjourned.
At the second meeting the same chairman as before will take her place and call for the reading of the minutes of the last meeting. When these are read and accepted, she will ask for the report of the Nominating committee, and when it is presented, the officers will be voted for, either viva voce, or by ballot, as the club prefers.
The new president and secretary will then take their chairs, and the business of hearing the reports of the other committees will go on. When a name for the club has been chosen, the constitution read and voted upon article by article, and the program planned, the president will name different chairmen to take charge of several following meetings; then this first regular meeting may adjourn, feeling that the club is successfully launched.
From this point the work should go on smoothly. The president will find her part of it much easier, however, if she will get a little book, called the Woman's Manual of Parliamentary Law, to which she can refer when any point of order comes up with which she is not familiar.
Once a club is started, the great question is, What shall we study? And of course the field is limited only by the tastes, the education of the members, and the number of books to which the club can have access. If there is a good public library, they may choose almost any literary subject. If there is none, the next thing is to find out if a travelling library can be had from the state librarian, and whether enough books can be borrowed to cover the whole subject thoroughly. If members can have neither of these helps, then the contents of individual libraries must be discussed, and a subject must be selected which needs few books to work with. It is to be noted that a good general reference book will be found most useful, even if a practical subject is finally decided upon.
One of the great dangers a new club has to face is the ambitious tendency to begin with some abstruse, difficult subject rather than with a simple one. The Literature of India, or the Philosophy of the Greeks may be tempting, but even with all the reference books in the world such subjects are a mistake for beginners. Something should be selected which is interesting to every one, not too far away from their every day reading, not too utterly unfamiliar. A country club may like a season on Bird Study. A village club may find Town Improvement full of suggestions. A city club can study some American Authors, or the Public Schools.
If all these things still seem too difficult to begin with, then at least an Embroidery Club may be founded as the very simplest foundation possible, the members to come each week with their fancy work and listen to one member who reads aloud something entertaining. This may do for a first season, and the second, a study subject may be taken up.
Sometimes where there is no library at hand, a Magazine Club makes a good preliminary step to larger things. Members tell a chairman what magazines they take, and agree to have them at the home of the chairman one day each week or fortnight. She will look them over and divide the contents into several parts, travel, biography, essays, stories, poetry, and so on. Then she will portion out among the members parts of the programs; one meeting may be on travel only, a second on essays, a third on poetry, three or four members reading selections from articles on these. Or, the programs may be varied by combining two or more subjects. This, too, makes a good training for a serious study in a second year, especially if a discussion of the subjects becomes a regular part of each meeting.