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. The associates got on each other's nerves. In those confused pages of the _Politics_, in which Aristotle criticises from the point of view of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out: 'It is difficult to live together in community,' communistic colonists have always 'disputed with each other about the most ordinary matters'; 'we most often disagree with those slaves who are brought into daily contact with us.'[10] [10] _Politics_, Book II. ch. V. The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments in the result of a complete refusal of scope, not only for the instinct of property, but for the entirely distinct instinct of privacy, and part of their disastrous nervous and moral effect must be put down to that. The boys in the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a little privacy by the adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more has been done since then by systems of 'studies' and 'houses.' Experience seems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with its alternation of home, class-room, and playing field, is better suited than a boarding-school to the facts of normal human nature. This instinctive need of privacy is again a subject which would repay special and detailed study. It varies very greatly among different races, and one supposes that the much greater desire for privacy which is found among Northern, as compared to Southern Europeans, may be due to the fact that races who had to spend much or little of the year under cover, adjusted themselves biologically to a different standard in this respect. It is clear, also, that it is our emotional nature, and not the intellectual or muscular organs of talking, which is most easily fatigued. Light chatter, even among strangers, in which neither party 'gives himself away,' is very much less fatiguing than an intimacy which makes some call upon the emotions. An actor who accepts the second alternative of Diderot's paradox, and _feels_ his part, is much more likely to break down from overstrain, than one who only simulates feeling and keeps his own emotional life to himself.