In the centre of the room stands a 'bureau' at which is posted a clerk, who rings whenever a waiter is wanted; brings the bill;[21] and, if any contested point occur, fetches the classical authorities on whist; for never is the slightest offence against the rules of the game suffered to pass without the infliction of the annexed punishment. This is rather annoying to a man who plays only for amusement; but yet it is a wise plan, and forms good players. The same clerk distributes the markers to the players to obviate the great annoyance of meeting with a bad payer, the Club is the universal payer. Actual money does not make its appearance, but every man who sits down to play receives a little basket of markers of various forms, the value of which is inscribed upon them, and which the clerk enters in his book; as often as he loses, he asks for more. Each player reckons with the clerk, and either proves his loss, or, if he has won, delivers up the markers. In either case he receives a card containing a statement of the result, and the duplicate of the reckoning in the account-book. As soon as any one is indebted more than a hundred pounds, he must pay it in the following morning to the clerk; and every man who has any demands can claim his money at any time. None but a nation so entirely commercial as the English can be expected to attain to this perfection of methodizing and arrangement. In no other country are what are here emphatically called 'habits of business' carried so extensively into social and domestic life; the value of time, of order, of despatch, of inflexible _routine_, nowhere so well understood. This is the great key to the most striking national characteristics. The quantity of material objects produced and accomplished--_the work done_--in England, exceeds all that man ever effected. The causes and the qualities which have produced these results have as certainly given birth to the dulness, the contracted views, the _routine_ habits of thought as well as of action, the inveterate prejudices, the unbounded desire for, and deference to, wealth, which characterize the mass of Englishmen. It were much to be wished that in our German cities we imitated the organization of English Clubs, which would be very practicable as to the essentials, though our poverty would compel us to dispense with many of their luxuries. In this case we ought to repay the English like for like, and not prostrate ourselves in puerile slavish admiration of their money and their name; but while we treated them with all civility, and even with more courtesy than they show to us, yet let them see that Germans are masters of their own house, particularly as many of them only come among us either to economize, or to form connexions with people of rank, from which their own station at home excluded them, or to have the satisfaction of showing us that in all arrangements for physical comfort we are still barbarians compared with them.[22]