Not long ago when some one said in his hearing, “There’s no first-class hotel in Washington,” he replied, “You forget the White House.” He has made it indeed a national hotel, or rather a great national assembling place. And he is ever unsatisfied, ever reaching out for more “doers,” for more and more people of interest or importance. He wishes all people of mark to bask in the Presidential sunshine, to give him the benefit of their intellect or character, or whatever they may have that is worth seeing or hearing. For he wishes to receive as well as to give. And he is determined that his court shall be entirely and completely representative. The world has seen nothing like it in recent centuries; the Emperor of Germany, broad though his sympathies are, is a snob in comparison. For a parallel we must go back to the courts of the emperor-presidents of Rome, in the days when Rome thought itself a republic. And the exigencies of plutocratic politics and the new social conditions have combined to attract the leaders of plutocracy’s fashion in plutocracy’s capitals, New York and Chicago, to favor Washington more and more each winter with their presence and their patronage. The new White House, which is thus in a fair way to become the social centre of the republic, is in one sense the first step toward an entirely new Washington. In every street at all fit for Presidential purposes great houses are going up for the leisurely rich, and smaller but attractive houses for the leisurely well-to-do. It is obvious to the most casual observer that to-morrow will see a brilliant and numerous society seated at Washington, a society devoted to luxury and entertaining and revolving round the President, and dazzling and dominating the servants of the people. Of all the bribes, which is so seductive, so insidiously corrupting as the social bribe? At the Congressional Library are exhibited models of the Washington the public administration purposes to build, has already begun to build. It will be a city of magnificent boulevards and parks and drives, and public buildings and national monuments. It will be probably the most splendid and most beautiful city in the world. It will probably be the one great city on earth where all who are not servants and tradespeople think and talk chiefly politics, literature, art, science--when they are not talking gossip and envying each other’s rank or looks or clothes or establishments. The made-over White House, astounding though it is as a sudden development, is but the crude inaugural of this Washington of to-morrow. But it is a beginning--a most audacious move on the part of one of the most audacious men who ever rose to first place in the republic. It is indeed audacious to be a democratic President with the ceremonial of a king--“a ceremonial more rigid than that of the court of the Czar,” according to the wife of one of the ambassadors.