compare with them? The capacity of a long line of American Ambassadors to warm both hands at the cheerful fire of English existence has been so palpable, their interests have so manifestly stretched beyond the humdrum game of protocols and despatches, they touch life at so many more points than the ordinary professional diplomat, that we should hardly know what to do if the United States accredited to the Court of St. James any one short of her best. A tongue-tied, unsociable, purely official American Ambassador has become unthinkable to this country. We calmly take it for granted that the representative of the United States, whoever he may be, will be a firstclass after-dinner speaker, and able and willing at any time to deliver an address, preside at a meeting, or unveil a monument. And so he invariably is. Why, then, should we not use him for our profit and entertainment ?"

The suggestion thus conveyed is valuable, now that our ambassadors are in hourly connection with Washington, and have become little more than messengers and clerks in their ordinary work. May they not be employed in acquainting people of one nation with the people of another? For this purpose, miscellaneous ability is more effective than training. After he had become famous, Thackeray sought appointment as secretary of legation at Washington. The place was refused him because it had been promised to some one else, and also because some budding diplomat was deemed fairly entitled to it. We make ambassadors of men like Thackeray. To compare with him J. F. T. Crampton, Esq., at about that time British minister to Washington, seems to us absurd.

It is said that training is needed to avoid the blunders often committed by men who are unacquainted with the ways of courts. This is obvious, but how important are these blunders, after all? They give rise to the gossip common in the diplomatic circles of Pumpernickel and elsewhere, but, except in Pumper

nickel, do the people of importance really care? Those who govern great states, be they sovereigns or ministers, are interested to find intelligence and capacity anywhere. They leave questions of precedence and clothes for the most part to their chamberlains and valets.

We have been successful in interesting the English people in our ambassadors, and their official position has not been much damaged by this interest. We have profited by the transaction, and this profit would have been impossible had we sent trained diplomats to London. In less degree we have profited elsewhere. We have certain advantages in supplying representatives of this sort, besides natural American adaptability. We draw from all the nations of Europe, and ought not to be strangers to any of them. Some of them are ripe for an ambassador who will talk to the people or to large classes of the people as our representatives have talked to the people of England for a generation. That one of our ambassadors appeals especially to men of letters, another to men of business, a third to men in public life, and still a fourth to teachers, but adds variety to the general interest aroused by the succession. In these latter days the people of one country are becoming curious about the people of another. International friendship and international tolerance, both important in their place, are advanced by international knowledge. The exchange of professors between our universities and those of continental Europe illustrates this growing interest of one people in another. Professor Wendell, lecturing last year in the provinces as well as in Paris, owed his welcome to his nationality as well as to his learning and literary skill. This year in Germany Professor Peabody has similar greeting from the Germans, and both will leave behind them sound knowledge and good feeling which the publication of their written lectures could not have effected. To expect our ambassador to open museums and to lecture on politics and literature seems, at first sight, to

be asking him to go outside his vocation; but does not our English experience prove that the service he thus renders is in itself important, and that it does not interfere with duties more strictly diplomatic? Let us suppose, for example, that President Roosevelt, when he leaves his office, were sent to represent us for a while in some continental country. The people of that country would be immensely interested to see him and hear him. Seeing and hearing him, they would be interested in us, and would learn to know us better. With increased knowledge, they would lose some misconceptions and prejudices, and thus we should profit by our representative. That the President is not a trained diplomat is unimportant. It may well be that we can employ him more profitably than as an ambassador, but the suggestion explains my meaning.

Illustration may be found also in the diplomacy of other countries. In the Boxer troubles of 1900, China owed much to her envoy in this country. No doubt he discharged his diplomatic duty at Washington, but he did much more. In the face of the American people, he maintained the Chinese cause under extraordinary difficulties. We did not altogether believe what he said, but we were forced to hear him. He interested us, and, even against our will, made us feel human kinship with his people, while he showed such knowledge of ours.

A trained diplomat, indeed, can be of service to a lawyer, or poet, or college president, sent to represent us at a European court. If the secretary of legation will attend to the routine of the office and will coach the ambassador in the details of behavior and dress, the latter can attend to serious matters with more leisure and effect. But to carry out this plan, the promotion of our regularly trained diplomats must stop short of the highest places in our diplomatic service, and it is doubtful if reasonably intelligent young men will be attracted to a service in which they must remain subordinates. No professional training, however well directed,

no experience, however extensive, will produce men to compare in general ability and distinction with our representatives in England, chosen almost at haphazard, during the last fifty years.

case.

In the matter of payment, we touch upon one of our most serious difficulties. The salaries now paid are too low, especially for married men with considerable families. Private means are now needed to supplement the official salary, and so we are coming to appoint as ambassadors only those men whose private means are large. This may not be absolutely necessary. Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Hay might live in London on $17,500 a year without loss of prestige, but it takes great distinction to make so little money go so far. We cannot expect to get it in every As things go, the salary is not ordinarily large enough to enable our representative to live like his diplomatic colleagues. Therefore we appoint rich men ambassadors, to eke out the salary from their private wealth. Not only do they do this, but they outspend their colleagues so lavishly, that soon the merely rich man will be embarrassed by the extravagance of his predecessor. To curtail expense, especially for an American, is difficult. Yet the inability to live on his official salary ought not to lead an ambassador to spend ten times that amount. No nation can pay a salary like that. No nation ought to do so. But few men have that amount of money to spend, and not all the members of the small class of the very rich have the distinction which we ought to find in our foreign representatives. To limit our choice to multi-millionaires would be in every way unfortunate. If an ambassador's expenses are very large, whether he can afford them or not, he makes it harder for his successor to practice economy. To determine what an ambassador ought to spend in one place or another may not be easy, but we should make the best guess possible, fix the salary accordingly, and intimate strongly and officially to our representatives that their style of living should correspond.

That its representatives should vie with princes and great nobles does the United States no good.

Our experience has thus shown that our diplomatic representatives may render us excellent and novel service by talking freely to the people of the countries they visit, to the learned and unlearned

alike, and that we may well hesitate to establish a profession of diplomacy which would at once deprive us of Motley, Bayard Taylor, Choate, Lowell, and Andrew D. White, and before long would probably shut out Bayard, Charles Francis Adams, Washburne, and perhaps John Hay.

I

We have arrived at a stage of human evolution that must be almost unprecedented in history. A large portion of mankind and just that portion which corresponds with the part that has hitherto created the events of which we know with some certainty is gradually forsaking the religion in which it has lived for nearly twenty centuries.

For a religion to become extinct is no new thing. It must have happened more than once in the night of time; and the annalists of the end of the Roman Empire make us assist at the death of Paganism. But, until now, men passed from a crumbling temple into one that was building; they left one religion to enter another; whereas we are abandoning ours to go nowhere. That is the new phenomenon, with the unknown consequences, in which we live.

not speak of the promises of our own, for they are the first to perish with the faith, whereas we are still living in the monuments erected by the morality born of that departing faith. But we feel that, in spite of the supports of habit, those monuments are yawning over our heads, and that already, in many places, we are without shelter under an unconsidered heaven that has ceased to give its orders. And so we are assisting at the more or less unconscious and feverish elaboration of a morality that is premature, because we feel it to be indispensable, made up of remnants gathered from the past, of conclusions borrowed from ordinary good sense, of a few laws half perceived by science, and, lastly, of certain extreme intuitions of our bewildered intelligence, which returns, by a circuitous road through a new mystery, to old-time virtues which good sense alone is not sufficient to prop up. Perhaps it will be curious to attempt to seize the first reflexes of that elaboration. The hour seems to strike at which many ask themselves whether, by continuing to practice a lofty and noble morality in an environment that obeys other laws, they are not disarming themselves too artlessly and playing the ungrateful part of dupes. They wish to know if the motives that still attach them to old virtues are not merely sentimental, traditional, and illusionary; and they seek,

somewhat vainly, within themselves for the supports that reason may yet lend them.

III

Placing on one side the artificial haven in which those who remain faithful to the religious certainties take shelter, we find that the upper currents of civilized humanity waver, seemingly, between two contrary doctrines. For that matter, these two parallel but inverse doctrines have through all time, like hostile streams, crossed the fields of human morality. But their bed was never so clearly, so rigidly dug out as now. That which in other days was no more than altruism and egoism instinctive and vague, with waves often mingled, has recently become altruism and egoism absolute and systematic. At their sources, which are not renewed, but shifted, stand two men of genius: Tolstoi and Nietzsche. But, as I have said, it is only seemingly that these two doctrines divide the world of ethics. The real drama of the modern conscience is not enacted at either of these too extreme points. Lost in space, they mark little more than two illusive goals which nobody dreams of attaining. One of these doctrines flows violently back towards a past that never existed in the shape in which that doctrine pictures it; the other ripples cruelly towards a future which there is nothing to prognosticate. Between these two dreams, which envelop and go beyond it on every side, passes the reality of which they have failed to take account. In this reality, of which each of us carries the image within himself, it behooves us to study the formation of the morality on which our latter-day life rests. Need I add that, when employing the term "morality," I do not mean to speak of the practices of daily existence, which spring from custom and fashion, but of the laws that determine the inner man?

IV

Our morality is formed in our conscious or unconscious reason, which,

from this point of view, may be divided into three regions. Right at the bottom lies the heaviest, the densest, and the most general, which we will call "common sense." A little higher, already striving towards ideas of immaterial usefulness and enjoyment, is what might be called "good sense. Lastly, at the top, admitting, but controlling as severely as possible the claims of the imagination, of the feelings, and of all that connects our conscious life with the unconscious and with the unknown forces within and without, is the indeterminate part of that same total reason, to which we will give the name of "mystic reason."

V

It is not necessary to set forth at length the morality of "common sense," of that good common sense which exists in all of us, in the best and the worst alike, and which springs up spontaneously on the ruins of the religious idea. It is the morality of each man for himself, of practical, solid egoism, of every material instinct and enjoyment. He who starts from "common sense" considers that he possesses but one certainty: his own life. In that life, going to the bottom of things, are but two real evils: sickness and poverty; and but two genuine and irreducible boons: health and riches. All other realities, happy or unhappy, flow from these. The rest-joys and sorrows born of the feelings and the passions—is imaginary, because it depends upon the idea that we form of it. Our right to enjoyment is limited only by the similar right of those who live at the same time as ourselves; and we have to respect certain laws established in the very interest of our peaceful enjoyment. With the reservation of these laws, we admit no constraint; and our conscience, so far from trammeling the movements of our selfishness, must, on the contrary, approve of their triumphs, seeing that those triumphs are most in accordance with the instinctive and logical duties of life.

There we have the first stratum, the

first state of all natural morality. It is a state which many men, after the complete death of the religious ideas, will never go beyond.

VI

As for "good sense," which is a little less material, a little less animal, it looks at things from a slightly higher standpoint, and consequently sees a little farther. It soon perceives that niggardly "common sense" leads an obscure, confined, and wretched life in its shell. It observes that man is no more able than the bee to remain solitary, and that the life which he shares with his fellows, in order to expand freely and completely, cannot be reduced to an unjust and pitiless struggle, or to a mere exchange of services grudgingly rewarded. In its relations toward others, it still makes selfishness its starting-point; but this selfishness is no longer purely material. It still considers utility, but already admits its spiritual or sentimental side. It knows joys and sorrows, affections and antipathies, the objects of which may exist in the imagination. Thus understood, and capable of rising to a certain height above the conclusions of material logic, without losing sight of its interest,-it appears beyond the reach of every objection. It flatters itself that it is in solid occupation of all reason's summits. It even makes a few concessions to that which does not perceptibly fall within the latter's domain: I mean to the passions, the feelings, and all the unexplained things that surround them. It must needs make these concessions, for, if not, the gloomy caves in which it would shut itself up would be no more habitable than those in which dull "common sense" leads its stupefied existence. But these very conces

sions call attention to the unlawfulness of its claims to busy itself with morality, once the latter has gone beyond the ordinary practices of daily life.

VII

Indeed, what can there be in common between good sense and the stoical idea

of duty, for instance? They inhabit two different and almost uncommunicating regions. Good sense, when it claims alone to promulgate the laws that form the inner man, ought to meet with the same resistance and the same obstacles as those against which it strikes in one of the few regions which it has not yet reduced to slavery: the region of æsthetics. Here it is very happily consulted on all that concerns the starting-point and certain great lines, but very imperiously ordered to hold its tongue so soon as the achievement and the supreme and mysterious beauty of the work come into question. But, whereas in æsthetics it resigns itself easily enough to silence, in morality it wishes to lord over all things. It were well, therefore, to put it back once for all into its lawful place in the generality of the faculties that make up our human person.

VIII

One of the features of our time is the ever-increasing and almost exclusive confidence which we accord to those parts of our intelligence which we have just described as common sense and good sense. It was not always thus. Formerly, man based upon good sense only a somewhat restricted and the vulgarest portion of his life. The rest had its foundations in other regions of our mind, notably in the imagination. The religions, for instance, and with them the brightest part of the morality of which they are the chief sources, always rose up at a great distance from the tiny limits of good sense. This was excessive; but the question is whether the present, contrary excess is not as blind. The enormous strides made in the practice of our life by certain mechanical and scientific laws make us allow to good sense a preponderance to which it remains to be proved that this same good sense is entitled. The apparently incontestable, yet perhaps illusory logic of certain phenomena which we believe that we know makes us forget the possible illogicality of millions of other phenomena which we do