THE AGENDA CLUB.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR,'']
S114.-1-011 will permit us to thank you for the encouragement which the hospitality of your columns has given us, and for the notable response we have received from your readers and the readers of other journals which have summarised your first notice of the Agenda Club. We have been compelled to advertise our inability to deal with the accumulated corre- spondence,—a result we had not dared to anticipate. A revised confidential memorandum is in the press, and will be sent to all serious inquirers within a few days.
There were points raised in the inspiring and sympathetic article in your last issue to which the answer was given in our letter ; but we should like to deal with a perhaps not unnatural misconception. The Agenda Club is not organised on a basis of snobbery (disguised as chivalry). We of the Inception Committee are not gentlemen in the deliberately and arbitrarily restricted sense of the " Open Letter." We sit in Council—a barrister, two journalists, a business organiser, an advertising expert, a member of the Stock Exchange—aided by the advice and criticism of many distinguished men. But our plans require the aid of a few men of leisure, capacity, and independent means, and we made our appeal to the class which contains such men, confident of the response which our proposals when seriously examined will receive. We did not expect definitely to recruit any inner- circle member till after the Agenda Club had attained a very large membership. We have, in fact, enlisted one such recruit, and have at least two other promising applications. We can only say in general that wherever we have fully tested our project it has satisfactorily met the test, as it has satisfactorily met the detailed criticism of many acute brains.
One other point. Though we do not disclaim one jot of the generous idealism which inspires your article, we think it much more necessary at this stage to insist on the almost brutal definition and materialism of our immediate objects. The recruit alluded to, who brought to the discussion of the matter a temperament distinctly critical and a considerable professional experience, found his only serious objection in the fact that the whole plan seemed to him so well thought out, so practical and workable, that he suspected " money in it," and wanted to be reassured that this was not a business proposition in the guise of philanthropy.
Of course our critics cannot have it both ways. And the fact that we have to meet objections both on the score of being too ideal and of being too sordidly practical makes a very good general plea for our case. Chivalry and idealism, says your article, are elusive words, elusive qualities. " It is notoriously and distressfully difficult to organise anything so indefinite." Yet patriotism is quite as indefinite, and we organised it into the Volunteer and Territorial movements. And a boy's sense of adventure and romance is vague, but it has been organised into the admirable Scout movement. Who can show signs that we are as a nation to-day any less con- cerned about movements towards social ameliorations than towards actual material defence P There is no sort of need that these two movements should compete, as in our own case they do not. Bat our point is that the one idealism, the one chivalry, is no whit less real than the other, and within certain defined limits can be as definitely organised. That is our
case, and the confidential memorandum contains the outline of our evidence.—We are, Sir, &e.,
THE INCEPTION COMMITTEE OF THE AGENDA CLUB.
6 Denmark Street, Charing Cross Road, W.C.
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