As society has been diluted, its political power has evaporated. For some years yet the old charm will indeed work fitfully in a country so well trained to the exercise of "influence"; but, outside the sphere of recommendations and minor appointments, the aspirant to office will now carry to Fleet Street the ambitions which in former years he laid on the doorsteps of Downing Street; when every woman is a "political hostess," the most hardened wire-puller must feel that she does not change the course of history by inviting a labour member to luncheon; the game has become so easy that all can compete without training or practice. Politics were finally desocialised when Mr. Asquith moved to Cavendish Square; they were commercialized and put on a business footing when Mr. Lloyd George took his place. No longer, as in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward and in the plays of Oscar Wilde, do high-born undersecretaries and omniscient editors chaffer away state secrets to sinister millionaires and seductive adventuresses at a glittering reception in the townhouse of a cultured duke; it may be doubted if they ever did. Nowadays, politics and the press meet over a hospitable breakfast-cup of coffee in a minister's house or engage in a friendly round of golf, with the minister's press-secretary ever at hand to carry the clubs and to dart back with telephone-messages; at night all take their places at the table of some untiring woman to whom society means the collection, under one roof, of the greatest number of most incongruous guests. The war lent a powerful impulse to this promiscuity. The old entertaining was perforce suspended; but London still contained several hundred men and women who were bitten with a craving to meet the celebrity of the hour; and war is prolific of celebrities. Every day threw up on the patient shores of England the man who had invented the new collapsible machine-gun, the man who had dropped bombs on Bagdad, the man who knew President Wilson's real feelings, the man whose slim volume of war-sonnets had convulsed the tea-tables of Chelsea. Night after night, they were to be met at dinner; as their eyes lost the early dazed look, they became men with a message; later, as their message, whether on Bagdad or the White House, became crisply stereotyped, they faded to the back of the room and made way for some one yet more arresting.[47] Had the heroes of the hour passed like lions in an itinerant menagerie, there would have been no congestion; but, inside the theatre and out, London is loyal to its old favourites.