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In this way he defeated the black-balling clique, and secured Sala's admittance to society of a somewhat graver type than that to which he had heretofore been accustomed. Even in 1878 I was not unversed in London clubs.
It was late when they quitted Grillion's, and Coningsby's brougham was detained for a considerable time before its driver could insinuate himself into the line, which indeed he would never have succeeded in doing had not he fortunately come across the coachman of the Duke of Agincourt, who being of the same politics as himself, belonging to the same club, and always black-balling the same men, let him in from a legitimate party feeling; so they arrived in Arlington Street at a very late hour.
Your account of my black-balling amused me. I think, as Quakers, they did right. There are some things hard to be understood. The more I think, the more I am vexed at having puzzled you with that letter; but I have been so out of letter-writing of late years that it is a sore effort to sit down to it; and I felt in your debt, and sat down waywardly to pay you in bad money.
Chamberlain and his friends, as an atonement for the misdeeds of the club, than such an alteration in the rules as would deprive the members of the power of black-balling candidates by transferring elections from the club at large to a special election committee. I was present at the meeting of the club at which a resolution to this effect was proposed by Lord Hartington.
He patches up a rotten system as he would supply the chasms in a worm-eaten manuscript, from a grovelling incapacity to do any thing better; thinks that if a single iota in the claims of prerogative and power were lost, the whole fabric of society would fall upon his head and crush him; and calculates that his best chance for literary reputation is by black-balling one half of the competitors as Jacobins and levellers, and securing the suffrages of the other half in his favour as a loyal subject and trusty partisan!
Then, as now, there was a black-balling clique in the club, and nobody could be absolutely certain of election; but my personal friends among whom William Black was foremost worked hard on my behalf, and secured my election in spite of the fact that I had a considerable number of black-balls.
The victim now avenged himself, with the same glee which a literary club throws into the black-balling of some evil tongue some too harsh and too powerful critic of the moment.
Nor do we call people who are really devoted to music selfish if, coming together for this, they make a special point of excluding the unmusical. Nor again would the imputation of selfishness lie against members of a club for black-balling a candidate who would, they feel, be uncongenial.
Bright, in which he had denounced black-balling as an odious and ungentlemanly practice, Sala delivered himself of an impassioned oration in which he asserted that there was no right more sacred in the eyes of every true-born Englishman than the right to black-ball anyone he pleased at a club election.
Chamberlain's organs in the Birmingham Press dealt with the black-balling of his brothers in such a fashion as almost to warrant the expectation that Pall Mall would be invaded, and the Reform Club sacked, if it did not repent in dust and ashes of the affront it had offered to the leader of Birmingham Radicalism. Nothing less would suit Mr.
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