He said that he had just been riding down Oxford Street in an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the omnibus passed over a section of the street in which macadam had been substituted for paving, all the passengers turned and spoke to each other.

'Some day,' he said, 'all Oxford Street will be macadamised, and then, because men will be able to hear each other's voices, the omnibus will become a delightful informal club.' Now nearly all London is paved with wood, and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses can hear each other whispering; but no event short of a fatal accident is held to justify a passenger who speaks to his neighbour.
Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of the cheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to bring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on terms of unrestrained social intercourse.

One can see in Thackeray's _Book of Snobs_, and in the stories of Thackeray's own club quarrels, the difficulties produced by this plan.

Nowadays clubs are successful exactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them that no member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personal acquaintances.

The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier, Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want of privacy.