In the competition of display, of “splurge,” shall “we, the people” be distanced by private persons? Is not “blowing it in” the great test of dignity and worth, the test established by our most “successful” citizens? Yet a few years and the President will be getting one hundred thousand dollars in salary and will think himself moderate in calling upon the nation for twice sixty thousand a year to be spent in maintaining the Presidential dignity. Less than that will seem shabby in the new Washington under the spell of the new concept of the Presidency as a social font. Simplicity and quiet as a measure of dignity will belong to the past. It still remains true, as when Burke said it, that “the public is poor.” True, the nation has riches, but only a few have wealth. True, wages have not actually increased over what they were _thirty years ago_. True, the incomes of the great mass of Americans are just about where they used to be; true, taxation is to them still a burden, and “making the ends meet” is still an anxious problem. But our plutocrats and the representatives of kings and other tax-eaters and people-plunderers must feel at home when they honor our White House with their presence. There is not the slightest surface indication that the Lord Great Chamberlain will preside over a diminished office. Public business in the narrow, strictly legal, old-fashioned democratic sense has now for the first time wholly withdrawn from the White House and is seated in what is derisively and not inaptly called the “Executive Hen-coop”--a temporary office building near by. The White House has been definitely and apparently permanently transformed into a place devoted to that part of the Presidential office which is not recognized in written law and which has hitherto been kept in the background. And so rapidly is the White House developing that no one need be astonished if it almost immediately becomes the social Mecca of the whole American people. Any one who has studied the effect of social life upon political life, of social customs upon politics, will appreciate that that transformation might be of profound and far-reaching importance. It might be significant of a new kind of republic, of a fallen Democracy on this American continent. It might well mean that the dream of all aggressive, self-aggrandizing office-holders had at last been realized; that for the people-ruled public administration contemplated by the fathers and embodied in the Constitution had been substituted a real, a people-ruling government. For, more powerful than any written laws, are the unwritten laws that bind men in the slowly, noiselessly forged chains of Habit. And what a busy, big man the Lord Great Chamberlain would be then!