Why send the objection to the Carlton Club?
may go and urge it at the Carlton Club
The club supplies a partisan address for an anti-democratic argument. In the 1879 Dickens's Dictionary of London, Charles Dickens Jr. describes the Carlton as the recognized headquarters of the Conservatives, with admission by a committee's ballot and priority consideration for peers, heirs to peerages and members of the Commons. The consulted witness is a modern transcription of that entry, not the printed volume itself.
Chesterton's point is therefore sharper than a general joke about a fashionable club. A professed democrat who dismisses the inherited judgment of ordinary people because they were ignorant is using the same kind of qualification that could exclude poor contemporary voters. The Conservative club becomes the imagined venue where that argument belongs. This is Chesterton's polemical alignment; the entry establishes the club's political identity and selective membership, not that every Carlton member held the particular view attributed to his hypothetical opponent.
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