THE IDEAL BRITISH DIPLOMATIST.
WE wonder, of all who read the very spirited sketch of the late Lord Dalling which appeared in the Times of Monday, how many sympathised with the praise therein bestowed on the deceased diplomatist. We fancy very few. In all the public service of Great Britain, no class obtains so little regard or respect from the general body of the people as the higher Diplo- matists. The notion that anybody can manage diplomacy, that an Ambassador is only a glorified Queen's Messenger ; that the Foreign Office is served, but not aided, by its great agents ; that any man who knows languages will do for an Ambassador, is fixed in the ordinary British mind, constantly affects both discussion and votes in the British Parliament, and is perhaps of all political prejudices the one for which there is least foundation. No country so needs good diplomatiste as Great Britain, for none is so separated from the general movement of foreign poli- tics, or has so little intuition as to their drift, or is so likely to be governed by men without foreign knowledge, and none is quite so hard to serve well. The ideal diplomastist for Great Britain must be a man of such qualifications that even to approach the character, as Lord Dalling certainly did, is to be a quite exceptional and exceedingly rare kind of man. A first-rate English diplo- matist must not only have all the qualifications required of a first- rate Continental envoy, but a great many others besides. Like him, he must, in the first place, be the kind of man accept- able at Courts, for if he is not, if he cannot hold his place in great society, if he has not that special tact which enables its possessor to catch a whisper as easily as a shout, to understand the character of a great person on very little evidence, to perceive the drift of a policy still undefined, no will never get information, never be able to smooth difficulties, never exert that personal influence over the half-dozen minds which lead if they do not govern mankind which so often pre- vents complications. The blunt plainness Mr. Cobden desired in diplomatists is excellent on great occasions, when you have a note in your pocket from the Foreign Secretary saying that Parlia- ment is quite in earnest, and that the point must be carried, even if it is necessary to risk war ; but it is of very little value in the ordinary intercourse of diplomatic life, and no help at all towards getting information. The diplomatist must, to be continuously effective, be, to use Lord Granville's phrase, a "great gentleman," a necessity so strongly felt on the Continent that government after government in France, in Italy, and in Russia has employed a caste which is distrusted rather than lose the aid of manner. The first Bonaparte, who knew his business, and who in the Army rather preferred new men —most of his favoured Marshals were of unusually low origin— always selected when he could cadets of the old houses for his diplomatic work. Even in the United States there has been for the same reason a distinct tendency to select envoys outside the "political," that is, the very vulgar service of the State,—to secure, in fact, the only available kind of aristocrat, a man of exceptionally wide culture, or attainments, or standing within the Union, a Motley, or Bancroft, or Adams, rather than a mere politician. Nor can we recall a single instance of an ex- tremely successful diplomatist who was not also a gentleman, unless it be the one whose history has helped to mislead English opinion, Benjamin Franklin, and he succeeded only in business in which decision was of much more importance than tact. He was a total failure in England, where his function was to inform and strengthen the party opposed to war ; and though he succeeded in France, he had only to secure an assistance it was good policy to give.
Acceptability, however, though indispensable, is not the only qualification of an English diplomatist. Any "great gentle- man" would be acceptable at any Court, but as Courts are ceasing to be all, and in some important States are very little, he must also be able to understand the nation to whom he is accredited, perhaps the last faculty which your mere aristocrat ever develops. It is of no use sending to Versailles or Washington a man to whom M. Thiers or General Grant will scarcely speak, but it is of nearly as little to send a man who is merely persona grata to either President. What is wanted is a man who can perceive the governing tone, the main drift of the nation with which he is dealing ; who knows by a sort of in- stinct its wishes, its opinion, its ways, and above all, its method of getting the better of other people. Diplomatists, even when they descend to no trickery, still occupy the position of lawyers, that is, of men whose interest and whose duty it is to get the very best terms they can for their clients, and
to sacrifice in getting it just as little as they may. To know what will be your opponent's "game," his notion of "address," his idea of the nearest method to his end, is therefore of the highest value to the ideal diplomatist, and it is a knowledge very rarely acquired. Lord Ripon evidently, for example, failed in this only. He would have succeeded in Constantinople, because his direct honesty would have been the exact quality to impress the Turk, whom, moreover, he would have suspected ; but he failed in Washington, because he did not recognise that all American politicians are, by profession or mental habit, lawyers, trained from boyhood to work within the limits of a paper consti- tution which they have to stretch by interpretations. He did not
see that the teat of his Treaty would be its capacity of inter- pretation by men who have been " pleading " in the technical sense all their lives ; that he could not be too precise, careful, and exhaustive ; that he ought to prepare an "under. standing" like a conveyancer preparing an abstract of title to a disputed estate. Lord Dolling, when he was at Wash-
ington, did perceive that, and not possessing the legal knowledge, looked about for a substitute, and with really superb insight found it in the practice of always using the words used by Americans in previous treaties, and consequently already interpreted. His oppo- nents, being "case" lawyers in grain, would not repudiate or modify interpretations once laid down, and thus Lord Dalling gained at
a blow an instrument of incomparable value, a terminology about
which there could be no mistake. Utter faithlessness is now con- fined to the diplomacy of the East, or indeed of Pekin alone, but an acute perception of the limits of faithfulness is as valuable to the diplomatist as it ever was, and as those limits vary in everk country, it is especially hard to acquire. It would be the same in France or in England. All rulers of France at all times have displayed a kind of faithful faithlessness, a dis- position to be slippery on points, while strictly honest in the main, which must be intensely puzzling to a diplomatist, yet if he cannot form a general idea of what these points will be, a task requiring high political judgment, he is of very little use. For instance, Prince Bismarck, in arranging the Treaty of Paris, would be aware that the sections about the indemnity would be fulfilled as exactly by France as by England, that is to say, that France would either pay or fight, but that if it were in human ingenuity to wriggle out of the occupation clauses, M. Thiess would wriggle out of them. This perceptiveness is of still greater value when the object is to secure an advantage without dictation, for without it the most carefully laid plans will constantly go aury. For example, it is quite useless to ask of a Russian Govern- ment, except after a war, terms which may exhibit it to its own subjects in a humiliating or even doubtful light ; that was the first mistake in the Black Sea affair. It is quite useless to ask of Germany anything the Army will feel should not be con- ceded, the point where the Macdonald business did mischief, and where Napoleon so utterly missed his mark when, during the negotiations on the Treaty of Prague, he asked the restoration of Diippel ; and quite useless to ask of England anything limiting the right of asylum, the source of a dozen diplomatic mis- understandings. The people will not have it, if diplomatists will. The man who in many different countries can be trusted to perceive these things, who is certain not to ask impossibilities, and not to be overreached, and at the same time not to give way, and who remains all through the delicate negotiation acceptable, is a very rare character, not to be bought, we can tell Mr. Ryland, for the very little money it pleases us to give him. There are not half-a-dozen such men in the public service of any State, and they cannot be overvalued. We in England are lucky when we get a nun of that competence for dealing with the affairs of one country or group of countries—Lord Stratford is the supreme ituitance of that kind of man—and we probably have but one man in the whole service who really rises to the ideal, though Lord Milling was very nearly another, would have been another entirely if his intellect—we do not mean his temper—had been a trifle more serene. He disliked people and peoples, which a diplomatist should never do.
All these qualifications belong, of course, to Diplomatists from any country, and are so rare in any country, that whenever the opposition to be mapped out is a little obscure—as, for instance, in the Vatican—foreign secretaries are frequently perplexed to find competent men, and their agents incessantly break down ; but the British diplomatist needs another qualification still. He must thoroughly understand the policy of an employer—the British Government—who does not and cannot know definitely what his own policy is. A servant of the Hohenzollern with full instructions knows precisely what his master wants, and how far he will go to get it ; but a servant of the Guelfs knows nothing whatever of all that, and cannot learn it from any instructions. So powerless is the British Government without popular support, and so uncertain is the popular mind on all questions of foreign policy, that—except in the single case of changes which affect India, changes about which the people are determined, and Government therefore is often brusquely frank—no Ambassador and no Foreign Secretary can definitely know his own mind, except from day to day. Till war is almost declared, no envoy can know how far he may press his points, whether he can menace, whether he may not at the last moment suffer what is to him the grievous humiliation of a repu- diation from home. For Lord Stratford de Redcliffe to promise that in certain eventualities he would summon the fleet was held, and justly held, to be an act in a British diplomatist of wholly exceptional audacity, and but that it succeeded, even Lord Stratford might not have been sustained. To act at all under I such circumstances a man requires the nicest knowledge not only of English policy, but of English policy as affected by public opinion at that moment, a knowledge which the ablest members, journalists, and writers—men who spend their lives in trying to acquire it —frequently fail to obtain. Even an experienced diplomatist may be utterly at fault, as on one occasion Mr. Odo Russell certainly was, and may make statements or take steps which land him in the end only in humiliating re- tractations. He has to steer the ship straight with a perpetually chopping wind. Without a minute knowledge of home ideas he must be paralysed, and yet how in exile is he, unless specially gifted, to acquire or to retain it,? If he has it, as, for instance, Sir James Hudson always appeared to have it, all is well ; but if he has it, and has a thorough knowledge of political surveying, and has all the qualities which make a man acceptable at great Courts, and can impress his own convictions on a Cabinet, of which three-fourths of the members know nothing of foreign politics, he is a person of whom it is very fitting that memoirs should be carefully written. We at least in this country shall find ten good Cabinet Ministers for one diplomatist of the ideal British kind.
Previous page
