TORONTO DECEMBER : 1919 :

A CLUB NOT MADE WITH HANDS
BY EDEN SMITH
T HE preliminary steps, we are told, towards a new home
for the Arts and Letters Club should be taken now.
We should consider what the Club's requirements in another
habitation may be and design to fulfill them. This announcement
will probably arouse a mixture of emotions in the minds
of our members. Perhaps regret that we may have to leave
much behind that we would not like to relinquish, or the pleasant
anticipation of at last obtaining some of the things we have.
long needed.
No doubt some of us will think this designing a disagreeable
business as if the change was something to be dreaded. This
dread of change may not arise because we lack energy or grudge
to expend it in reconstruction. We may be only conservative
because we know the difficulty of obtaining in a new environment
that peculiar quality we value in the old, and which seemed
to come there of itself without any design or effort of ours.
Can we deliberately make that again? It is not an easy
task to make a new home. We may build a new house, but will
it be a new home for us? Home seems to be the place of
young and growing things. If we think that making a new
one will be beyond our power, it may be that we have ceased
growing. We had better not believe that, but imagine that our
growing has only been retarded for a little while by an inclement
season.
Let us try to remember what were the things that made the
old place more attractive than any other for us, and adhere
to them fast enough to prevent them from being smothered as
we fancy they may be in a new one.
Those of us who do not like the process of reconstruction,
dislike it probably because we fear the elaborate paraphernalia of
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