The Last Gasp of Drawing-Room Politics

In 1865, as Confederate troops were surrendering to Union forces and the reconstruction of a fractured nation was beginning, The Spectator, a British weekly, published an editorial assessing the state of diplomacy on the other side of the Atlantic. “Nothing perhaps in politics is so hard to explain as the precise connection which exists in this country between ‘society’ … and politicians,” it began, before concluding, “There is no doubt something utterly base somewhere in a society in which an invitation can affect a vote, or a great saloon influence a division, but then there are evils in the absence of that baseness.”