THE NEW UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR. T HE appointment of Colonel John
Hay as the United States Ambassador to England will be a very welcome one to English society. Whether that will make the appointment equally popular amongst our cousins over the water is not quite so certain. There can be no doubt that just at present the friendliness of our feelings towards the people of the United States is greater than the friendliness of their feelings towards us. The reason is not very recondite. They are rather disposed to resent the consequences of their own greatest advantage over us,—their comparative seclusion from the political con- troversies and quarrels of Europe. They are always hearing of England, England, England, and yet feel all the time that while they are not only outstripping us in population and overtaking us in wealth and power, they yet never hear of any gaining of the Stars and Stripes over the ascendency of the Union Jack ; but they would like to have both the advantages of " splendid isolation" and the advantages of political and social pre- ponderance. This makes them feel a certain jealousy of what is really our comparative misfortune, that we are embroiled in so many more diplomatic con- flicts than those in which they take any part. And as a natural consequence they often resent the cordiality of our feeling towards their Ambassador when their own feeling towards our Ambassador is one of half-puzzled emulation. Why are we so eager to show friendship towards the American representative while they are fretting over the greater comparative significance of the English representative ? It looks almost as if there were nothing which alarmed us in the weight of his political influence, while there is so much that alarms them in the weight of our own diplomatic representative's political influence. The Monroe doctrine ma.y be all very well, but if it has the effect of diminishing their authority in Europe, even though it increases it for their own continent, it piques them at least as much as it satisfies them. What they most earnestly contend for we acknowledge with perfect cordiality, though they would prefer apparently that we should have contested it and been mortified by our defeat. That makes them feel as if we had no jealousy of them, while they have often felt jealousy of us, and that is not a mutual relation which, in spite of its great advantages for them, they alto- gether enjoy.
Hence we doubt whether the general satisfaction with which Colonel John Hay's nomination as Ambassador to England has been received here will excite any prevalent feeling of pleasure in the United States. They would rather perhaps have seen us expressing a little less satisfac- tion and a little more anxiety. It is certain that Mr. Bayard's great social success here has been rather against him at home. But perhaps in this case the fact that Colonel John Hay's reputation here is due to our apprecia- tion of his peculiarly American humour and peculiarly American audacity of imagination may make a difference in his favour. Our cousins in the United States may recognise that though he, like the late Mr. James Russell Lowell, is known chiefly for his humorous verse, he is not known chiefly for having written humorous verse which fell in with our specially anti-slavery prepossessions, but rather for the boldness with which he has given ex- pression to the daring, and indeed imperious, violence of the Western indifference to life. There is a note in Colonel John Hay's most celebrated verse which rather curdles British blood. The picture of Jim Bludso is as far removed from the picture of an English or British hero as it would be possible to find. He was not respectable, he was not peaceful, but he was formid- able:— "He weren't no saint,—these injineers Is all pretty much alike— One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill And another one here in Pike : A keerless man in his talk was Jim, And an awkward band in a row, But he never flunked and he never lied, I reckon he never knowed how."
That is the kind of hero whom the Western States would like to have held up for our wonder and admiration, and perhaps they may appreciate the slight shiver of astonish- ment with which conventional England hears concerning Jim Bludso that- " He seen his duty a dead-sure thing, And be went for it thar and then:
And Christ ain't a goin' to be too hard On a man that died for men."
The Western Americans, too, would like to think that Colonel John Hay has celebrated in his " Mystery of Gilgal " the utter recklessness of Western Americans in risking and taking life, when old Jedge Phinn—the " high-tonedest man " in all the country round,—begins a quarrel which ends in a multitude of deaths about the appropriation of a particular glass of whiskey after this fashion :— " He went for his leven inch bowie knife,-
' I tries to foller a Christian life; But I'll drap a slice of liver or two, My bloomin' shrub, with you."
It is to be hoped, we think, that a literary man who has gained his reputation in England by that sort of portrait- painting, whether it be regarded as satirical or simply as realistic, will not be given credit for truckling in any way to English conventions. And we hope, therefore, that the disposition in England to do full justice to his genius will not excite any suspicion against him in the Western States, as if he were too agreeable to this country, and untrue to the genius of his own land.
The truth is that the United States have not as yet wanted, and therefore have not produced, the peculiar species which in Europe we speak of as diplomatists. They have not been in any need of the reserved, cautious, dis- criminating, subtle, sensitive, watchful minds which note every expression, every contraction, every relaxation of nerve, in the countenance of those with whom they con- verse, and allow it to influence their emphasis and to give a certain significance to their accent and their glance. The American diplomacy has been comparatively simple and has lost nothing, has even gained in effectiveness, by being simply and roundly expressed. And, consequently, all they have wanted in their diplomatic representatives has been familiarity with the language and literature of the various States of Europe, and enough strength of purpose to hold their own against pressure. This they have found sufficiently in their literary men, though without any of the special training which has given to the diplo- matists of Europe a tradition and faculty of their own. Hitherto at least the United States have had no need of this, and therefore have not taken the steps by which alone it could be acquired. They have not had complex problems to solve ; they have not had to weigh the advantages of cordiality with this Power against cordiality with that. They have not needed the fine balance and the delicate appreciation of the give-and-take of diplomatic suggestions acquired in a long inheritance of difficult negotiations, failures, and successes. If they ever come to need anything of the sort they will have to establish schools of diplomacy trained in European habits and European manners, and, more than that, they must feel the pressure of European emergencies and needs, without which European methods of diplomacy would be worthless and perhaps even prejudicial. That cannot be till the Americans abandon their policy of aloofness from European issues, and begin to interfere in European dis- putes. And till then we doubt if American diplomatists will be at all the better for any diplomatic education at all more elaborate than that of Mr. Lowell, or Mr. Bayard, or Colonel John Hay.
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