nts, besides
a certain quantity of tea and sugar. Thus the club had prospered
exceedingly, and had been the instrument of introducing comfort and
festive enjoyment to no small number of persons who might, and in all
probability would, have had little to eat or drink, and, consequently,
little cause for merriment, at that season. This is really a very
pleasant fact to contemplate, connected though it be with a somewhat
ludicrous kind of ingenuity, which must be exercised in order to bring
it about. To anybody but a London shopkeeper, the attempt would appear
altogether hopeless, to transform a hundred poor persons, who were
never worth half-a-crown a piece from one year's end to the other,
into so many 9s. customers; and yet the thing is done, and done, too,
by the London grocer in a manner highly satisfactory, and still more
advantageous to his customers. Is it too much to imagine that the
lesson of provident forethought thus agreeably learned by multitudes
of the struggling classes--for these clubs abound everywhere in
London, and their members must be legion--have a moral effect upon at
least a considerable portion of them? If one man finds a hundred needy
customers wise enough to relish a plum-pudding of their own providing,
surely they will not _all_ be such fools as to repudiate the practice
of that very prudence which procured them the enjoyment, and brought
mirth and gladness to their firesides! Never think it! They shall go
on to improve, take our word for it; and having learned prudence from
plum-pudding, and generosity from goose--for your poor man is always
the first to give a slice or two of the breast, when he has it, to a
sick neighbour--they shall learn temperance from tea, and abstinence,
if they choose, from coffee, and ever so many other good qualities
from ever so many other good things; and from having been wise enough
to join the grocer's Plum-pudding Club, they shall end by becoming
prosperous enough to join the Whittington Club, or the Gresham Club,
or the Athenaeum Club, or the Travellers' Club; or the House of
Commons, or the House of Lords either, for all that you, or we, or
anybody else, can say or do to the contrary.

We know nothing of the original genius who first hit upon this mode of
indoctrinating the lower orders in a way so much to their advantage;
we hope, however, as there is little reason to doubt, that he found
his own account in it, and reaped his well-deserved reward. Whoever he