A Human Diplomatist BOOKS OF THE DAY

By WILSON HARRIS

SOME diplomatists are human, some not. Lord Howard of Penrith is essentially among the former—perhaps because

before he settled down to diplomacy he had (as he told us in

his first volume) stood for Parliament, helped Charles Booth with Life and Labour in London, tried rubber-planting in

Tobago, fought in the Boer War as a trooper, been taken prisoner and escaped. Throughout his diplomatic career the human side was always foremost, and simplicity always more congenial than show. Berne was his favourite post, because it was close to lakes and woods and mountains, and social engagements so few that family life was little interrupted.

The attraction of Madrid when he went there as Ambassador was a society that was not at all exacting, so that we could spend many evenings at home en famille."

Whatever Lord Howard may have owed his success to it was not ambition. When he was first spoken of as a

is possible " for Washington his desire was for nothing better

than Berne, and when he did finally secure what (except perhaps Paris) is the chief prize in the diplomatic service, it was only because his letter to Curzon explaining how unfitted he was for such a post miscarried. At the end of it all he can never quite reconcile himself to not having made a success (and a career) of rubber-planting. And he has quite forgotten, so far as I can see, to mention his elevation to the House of Lords anywhere in his book, though he does record with enthusiasm the efforts he made in that Chamber to get a Wild Birds Protection Act into law.

But that is the man, and this after all is in the main the autobiography of the diplomatist—a diplomatist who in the years dealt with in this volume saw service as Consul-General at Crete and Budapest, as Minister at Berne, and at Stockholm through the War years, at the Paris Peace Conference, as Ambassador at Madrid before and after Primo de Rivera's coup d' Nal, and at Washington under the Coolidge and Hoover administrations. Varied vantage-points ;—and the observer, if uniformly generous in his estimates of men, was shrewd and level-headed none the less. The admiration which he con- ceived for the Swiss, Federation as a model democratic State —a better model in his considered view than Great Britain —was remarkable.

British diplomatic tradition is based on mobility. Ministers and Ambassadors are always moving on. Their minds, no doubt, are thereby broadened, but they too often have to leave a post just as they have found their feet there. But thanks to the War Lord Howard had full five years at Stockholm, where the delicate task of keeping a neutral country benevolently neutral taxed all his powers daily. It is not going much too far to say that ornithology saved the situation. Those were days when mobilisation was only a step from war. On the second or third day of August, 1914, Dr. Axel Munthe, the author of San Michele, whose friendship with Lord Howard was based on birds, told him that unless the Allies gave Sweden categorical assurances that her integrity'and independence would be respected the army was to be mobilised. The British Minister, in response • to an urgent cable to London, got authority to give the necessary assurance. He went post-haste with a Note to the Foreign Minister, who read it gravely, then relaxed and said : " With this I shall be able to prevent the mobilisation of the Swedish army at the Council meeting tomorrow." And he was.

Of the Peace Conference, with its innumerable facets, no one can ever write too much. Lord Howard was there with an able staff to deal with Russian affairs, and had collected a Theatre of Life. Vol. II: 1905-1936. By Lord Howard of Penrith. (Hodder and Stoughton. 21s.) mass of evidence on the situation, " but," he observes, " I cannot remember that I was once asked to discuss with the Prime Minister any single matter connected with Russia and her attitude to her neighbours." That plaint was familiar at Paris. From the usual crop of Peace Conference anecdotes anyone can select at will. Some given here are new, some not. Both characteristic and new, I think, is the apology of Lord Balfour to an army of experts (including Lord Howard) whom the Council of Five had kept waiting in an ante-room a whole afternoon ; the Foreign Secretary was so sorry, " espe- cially as the last hour had been employed in comparing the characters of Napoleon and Frederick the Great." Lord Howard mentions with warm appreciation Nansen's scheme for a " food offensive " into Russia, but does not add (what not many people knew) that the actual initiative came from Mr. Hoover, who realised better than most men what food could do anywhere in Europe in those days.

So the scene shifts, from Paris to Madrid, from Madrid to Washington. The chapters on Spain can be read with special profit at the present moment, and it is to be noted that, democrat as Lord Howard unquestionably is, he is clear that democracy never really worked in Spain. But if he thought Spanish politics deplorable, he loved the place and the people, and as a set-off to the hideousness of which the papers are full today his farewell is worth recording :

" We said goodbye with sorrow to the Spanish people, splendid, courteous, kindly, dignified, and when unspoiled, least avaricious, most contemptuous of money in the world, in which lies their great charm."

But with what other qualities !

At Washington Lord Howard succeeded Sir Auckland Geddes ; life was agreeable, with rum-running complications the chief problem. He tells a pleasant story of how Calvin Coolidge became President. He was Vice-President, and the

news of Harding's death reached him in the middle of the night, when he was staying with his old father in a humble homestead in New England. He had to be sworn in as President immediately by the nearest magistrate—and that happened to be his father : " So there, in the little parlour, by the light of an old-fashioned oil lamp at 2.47 a.m., Mr. Coolidge senior administered the oath to his son and made him President of what is potentially the most powerful State in the world."

Incidentally we are given first-hand evidence of Mr. Kellogg's part in broadening out what Briand meant to be a Franco- American agreement into the all but universally accepted Pact of Paris. Lord Howard believed in the Pact. He believes still in a League of Nations making unhesitating use of mineral sanctions.

Was Lord Howard a great Ambassador ? That depends on what the criterion is. British diplomats are not left for decades to take roots in a capital, like Jusserand at Washington or Catnbon in London. And our own greatest Ambassadors have often been amateurs, like Lord Bryce or Lord D'Abernon; but they were men picked not from a limited service but from a nation. It is not asked of a diplomatist that he shall be dramatic or spectacular. Nothing, in such a vocation, could be more disastrous. Lord Howard's outstanding quality was one which he himself attributes to the two men he has most reverenced, Pope Pius X and. King George V—what may be described in the literal sense of a formal phrase, " humble service." He filled his many posts with ability and such distinction as a wisely-ordered diplomatic career admits of. The story he tells is straightforward, unassuming and singularly attractive—well above the common level of autobiographies.