Four Years in Rebel Capitals | Page 6

of all these elements, was the resident families of old
Washingtonians. These had lived there so long as to be able to winnow
the chaff and throw the refuse off.
There has ever been much talk about the corruption of Washington,
easy hints about Sodom, with a general sweep at the depravity of its
social system. But it is plain these facile fault-finders knew no more of
its inner circle--and for its resident society only is any city
responsible--than they did of the court of the Grand Turk. Such critics
had come to Washington, had made their "dicker," danced at the hotel
hops, and been jostled on the Avenue. If they essayed an entrance into

the charmed circle, they failed.
Year after year, even the Titans of the lobby assailed the gates of that
heaven refused them; and year after year they fell back, baffled and
grommelling, into the pit of that outer circle whence they came. Yet
every year, especially in the autumn and spring, behind that Chinese
wall was a round of entertainments less costly than the crushes of the
critic circle, but stamped with quiet elegance aped in vain by the
non-elect. And when the whirl whirled out at last, with the departing
Congress; when the howling crowd had danced its mad carmagnole
and its vulgar echoes had died into distance, then Washington society
was itself again. Then the sociality of intercourse--that peculiar charm
which made it so unique--became once more free and unrestrained.
Passing from the reek of a hotel ball, or the stewing soiree of a Cabinet
secretary into the quiet salon of a West End home, the very atmosphere
was different, and comparison came of itself with that old Quartier
Saint Germain, which kept undefiled from the pitch that smirched its
Paris, through all the hideous dramas of the bonnet rouge.
The influence of political place in this country has long spawned a
social degradation. Where the gift is in the hands of a fixed power, its
seeking is lowering enough; but when it is besought from the
enlightened voter himself, "the scurvy politician" becomes a reality
painfully frequent. Soliciting the ballot over a glass of green corn juice
in the back room of a country grocery, or flattering the cara sposa of
the farmhouse, with squalling brat upon his knee, is scarcely calculated
to make the best of men more of "an ornament to society." Constant
contact with sharpers and constant effort to be sharper than they is
equally as apt to blunt his sense of delicacy as it is to unfit one for
higher responsibilities of official station. So it was not unnatural that
that society of Washington, based wholly on politics, was not found
wholly clean. But under the seething surface--first visible to the casual
glance--was a substratum as pure as it was solid and unyielding.
Habitues of twenty years remarked that, with all the giddy whirl of
previous winters in the outer circle, none had approached in mad
rapidity that of 1860-61. The rush of aimless visiting, matinées and

dinners, balls and suppers, followed each other without cessation; dress
and diamonds, equipage and cards, all cost more than ever before. This
might be the last of it, said an uneasy sense of the coming storm; and in
the precedent sultriness, the thousands who had come to make money
vied with the tens who came to spend it in mad distribution of the
proceeds. Madame, who had made an immense investment of
somebody's capital in diamonds and lace, must let the world see them.
Mademoiselle must make a certain exhibit of shapely shoulders and of
telling stride in the German; and time was shortening fast. And Knower,
of the Third House, had put all the proceeds of engineering that last bill
through, into gorgeous plate. It would never do to waste it, for Knower
meant business; and this might be the end of the thing.
So the stream rushed on, catching the weak and timid ones upon its
brink and plunging them into the whirling vortex. And still the rusty
old wheels revolved, as creakily as ever, at the Capital. Blobb, of
Oregon, made machine speeches to the sleepy House, but neither he,
nor they, noted the darkening atmosphere without. Senator Jenks took
his half-hourly "nip" with laudable punctuality, thereafter rising
eloquent to call Mr. President's attention to that little bill; and all the
while that huge engine, the lobby, steadily pumped away in the
political basement, sending streams of hot corruption into every artery
of the government.
Suddenly a sullen reverberation echoes over the Potomac from the
South. The long-threatened deed is done at last. South Carolina has
seceded, and the first link is rudely stricken from the chain.
There is a little start; that is all. The Third House stays for