Made my debut in the New York Club this afternoon. Dined there with Charles Strong better and more cheaply than at Del-monico’s. One enjoys, moreover, a sensation of being nobby and exclusive when one dines there, which ought to promote digestion, but it has 1 failed to do so this time, for I’m dyspeptic tonight with cephalalgic tendencies. Saw but a few men there, including Bill Pennington, who was a little tight and exuberantly cordial. My respect for the Club has greatly increased since Baron Rothschild’s friends had to withdraw his name, because the Baron, though illustrious and a millionaire, was immoderately given to lewd talk and nude photographs. I did not give the Council credit for moral courage enough to deny him admission.
After dinner George Anthon came in and we went to Niblo’s Pantomime and Horse-Opera. I came off before the performance was over, finding two hours of it sufficient. In Cinderella some two score very little children took part, some mere toddlers, and some very lovely. Poor little souls!—it’s a horrid, murderous sacrifice of childhood. But I suppose the sin rests on that convenient scapegoat, the abstraction we call "society.” I paid my fifty cents (or rather my dollar for an orchestra seat) like others, and so contributed, as much as any one person commonly contributes, to maintain this child-slaughtering system. But I really did not know or suspect, nor had I reason to suspect, that the entertainment I was "patronising” was to be provided, in part at least, at such terrible cost.
SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 39-40
