Two thousand two hundred years have passed since Cneius Flavius stole from his employer, Appius, a list of the forms employed in Roman law, and published a description of them for the benefit of his fellowcitizens. Since that day forms, formulas, formularies, and formalities, have gone on, multiplying in such huge proportions, that no mind, however arithmetically powerful, can possibly realise their present number. For two-and-twenty centuries and particularly since we have grown civilised-a great part of the inventive power of mankind has been incessantly directed, in every land, to the discovery of new special shapes of rules, wordings, documents, reports, returns, and regulations, all of which have been rendered obligatory, at some time or other, by edict or by usage. More books have been written about forms than on any other subject that the world. has known; forms have been created for, and applied to, every imaginable class of questions, and every act of life; Greek fire, dinner, troubadours, and women's rights; gladiators, salvation, chemistry, and ordeal by touch; single combat, cricket, cockfighting, and revolutions, have all, in turn, had forms applied to them; and the fractiousness of nature has

alone prevented eager legislators from affixing strict formalities to earthquakes, avalanches, meteors, and typhoons. Nothing that we can anyhow get at is permitted to subsist without a form; all the occupations and all the trades of men from breaking stones to winning battles, are controlled by forms; ambition, appetite, and love, are manifestly restrained by them; and

it may be doubted whether even such seemingly independent subjects as toothache, London fogs, and the potato disease, are absolutely free from their hidden action. But, all permeating and all subjugating as their influence has always been, universal and omnipresent as it continues still to be, it is in law and in international relations that that influence is most extensive and most palpable. Law appears at first sight, perhaps, to be, of the two, the more overloaded with formalities; but, if the abundance of legal forms has become every where a proverb if several sorts of lawyers, aud many thousand lawyers of each sort, have been found necessary in every country to aid the bewildered population to carry out the countless legal formulas imposed upon it—a little consideration shows us that, though our exterior relations may seem to be less encumbered with special details, it is not because international formalities are in reality less numerous, but solely because they are hidden away under various deceptive names which disguise their real nature. What we call tariffs, customs' regulations, ships' manifests, bills of lading, and all manner of trading papers;-what we call passports, quarantine, rights of local jurisdiction, naturalisation, domicile, and the thousand complicated observances between peoples, -are nothing else but international formalities, just as much as treaties. are. They offer very large matter for examination, far too large to be considered here as a whole, for, even in limiting our attention to the purely diplomatic elements of the question, we shall have more

than enough to talk about. All that we can do is to select a few examples, choosing out of the enormous mass before us those which seem best to illustrate the more essential aspects of the subject.

Most of the treatises on international law contain eager dissertations on the shape, sentiment, and style of diplomatic documents; and special formularies in scarcely credible variety, have been provided in order to furnish models of every kind of act, letter, or communication, which can possibly be wanted under any sort of circumstances. The mere titles of all these books are curious and suggestive. There are at least fifty different "Guides," besides a boundless quantity of works on "the manner of negotiating," "the principles of negotiation," "the art of negotiating," followed by 66 essays on court style," "courses of diplomatic style," "literature of states' rights," and "courtesies in war;" and, that no sort of form in peace or war should be neglected, there is even a special German treatise on "Trumpeters and their prerogatives." As this last astounding statement will naturally provoke doubt, it may be useful to add at once, that the treatise in question is contained in the fourth volume of a collection published in 1741 at Halle, under the long name of Der prüfenden Gesellschaft fortgesetzte zur Gelehrsamkeit gehörige Bemühungen." But, as might perhaps be expected, these various books are in substance identically alike: the matter of which they treat is vast, but it has a limit, and all the Mémoires which could be filled with new details on it were composed a long time ago. Authors vary in the tongue which they employ, in pomposity and unction, and in words and faculty of expression; but these are the only real differences between the

piles of publications which treat of "forms." The Germans have of course been fertile in this sort of literature; at least one half of the volumes devoted to it have been edited beyond the Rhine, where the "diplomatischer Kanzleistyl" has long been profoundly studied. These guide-books (for such, in fact, they are) treat of everything which can possibly be affiliated to the subject, and sometimes include topics which seem, to unelastic minds, to lie a long way outside it. They do not constitute light reading, and, after the first three minutes, they cease even to be instructive; but they show us international vanities in another of their forms, and that is why we are looking into them .for examples.

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The first question touched upon in these ready letter-writers for diplomatists in difficulties is usually the choice of the language to be used for official communications; and an idea may be at once obtained of the hair-splitting spirit of analysis with which the matter has been dissected, by the fact that, before approaching the discussion of selection between different tongues, authorities begin by dividing talk itself into six uses- -Court, Diplomatic, Church, Judicial, School, and vulgar. With such a starting-point as this, it will easily be understood that the treatment of the entire subject has attained a height of bewildering amplification, of labyrinthic branch-considerations, o universal developments wandering into connexity with space and time, of which no unprepared outsider could suspect the possibility. The human mind has shown itself to be ingenious enough in its inventions of new religions (which in America are still budding at an average of one per week); but really, Teutonic writers have exhibited an almost equal copiousness

of imagination in their description of the possible shades, tints, and delicacies of diplomatic style. One reads their meandering dissertations with a feverish but half-stupid awe, and with a persistent curiousness as to what could have been the physical aspect of the men who, with the evident conviction that they were rendering a service to mankind, spent their lives in seriously composing such monstrous twaddle. It would be useless to give their names, for nine-tenths of them are utterly unknown to fame, and the owners of the other tenth have long ago ceased their labours; besides which, it would be disagreeable to their families.

Having thus defined the different categories of talk, these word-refiners go on to say that "the right of equality of nations extends to the choice of the language which their Governments employ for diplomatic communications." Who would have suspected that when our Foreign Office (which, itself, is disrespect fully denominated F. O. by its retainers) sends a telegram in English to the King of Dahomey, it is exercising "one of the rights of the equality of nations"? And yet it is so! How proud it makes one feel to learn, in this sudden way, that the simplest acts of life may be manifestations of glorious principles, and that possibly we can do nothing without implying something that we didn't know anything about. But, after this bright beginning, the form-discussers go on to tell us, in mazy phrases, with references, foot-notes, explanations, and quotations of opinions and authorities, that there is no rule at all to guide either F. O. or the Ministry of any other Power in the determination of the tongue which it should prefer for its letters to neighbouring states. It is particularly disappointing to discover, after strug

error to

gling through seventy-four tangled pages, which contain 451 extracts, in eight European languages, and in Latin, Greek, and Turkish too, that the sole object of the author, all the time, was to prove conclusively, by the strongest arguments, and with the aid of all his friends and predecessors, that, from the beginning, he had nothing at all to say. What does appear, however, to come clearly out of this, is that all countries have always used whatever dialect they pleased in their dealings with foreign courts, and that it is altogether an suppose that there is or ever has been, any special language generally accepted for diplomatic purposes. It is true that momentary preferences, resulting from temporary causes, have existed at certain periods; it is true that in the time of Castilian glory, Spanish was brought into frequent use; that Latin was a good deal talked and written down to the eighteenth century; and that, after the victories of Louis XIV., French became rather generally employed; but there are quantities of instances, at all these dates, of the simultaneous handling, by every nation, of its own language alone for negotiations and for drafting treaties. All the wars and the conquests which were then perpetually taking place in Europe, left languages unchanged, both in their official and their domestic character. It is only during relatively recent years, that conquerors have recognised the policy and even the necessity of imitating the old Roman practice, and of rendering their own tongue obligatory on the vanquished. If, then, the idea of utilising language as a means of consolidating dominion was not resorted to by great captains or great Ministers, it follows, naturally, that they must have seen less advantage still in the choice of any special dialect for mere

international relations. Accident or fashion appears to have beenin this matter, as in so many others -the sole guide of diplomatists, for there was, certainly, no kind of definitely adopted rule or habit.

If we select examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -the very epoch when French is imagined to have been becoming an almost universal tongue -we find the most hopelessly contradictory evidence on the subject. We discover that some of the most famous treaties, those of Nimeguen, Ryswick, Utrecht (1713), Vienna (1725 and 1738), and of the Quadruple Alliance, were all in Latin; that in 1752 the Austrian minister at Naples spoke Latin officially to the king; that though Louis XIV. wrote in French to Leopold II. of Austria, the latter replied by a complaint that this act was contrary to the usage of the Courts, which required that all communications between France and Germany should be in Latin; and that, though the treaty of Lunéville (1801) was written in French alone, the ratification of it by the German Emperor was given in Latin. But, in opposition to all these cases of the maintenance of Latin, there are almost as many contemporaneous examples of the adoption of French, not only by France itself, but curiously enough by German Governments between themselves. French was used for the purely local treaties of Breslau and Berlin (1742), Dresden (1745), Hubertsbourg (1763), and Teschen (1779). The value of this odd proof of the voluntary application of French by foreign States is, however, upset again by the fact that, in other cases where French has been employed, a clause has been inserted in the treaty explaining that France had no right to deduce any claim of precedence from this admission of

to

her language. Examples of this stipulation will be found in the treaties of Rastadt (1714), Aix-la Chapelle (1768), and in the final act of the Congress of Vienna. This last treaty says (Article 120), "The French language having been exclusively employed for all the copies of the present treaty, it is recognised by the Powers who have taken part in this Act that the employment of that language is to produce no consequences in the future; each power reserves itself the right of adopting, in future negotiations and conventions, the language which it has previously used for its diplomatic relations, and the present treaty cannot be cited as an example contrary to established usages." It will be recognised that it is difficult to extract from such conflicting testimony any sign of a real preference or of an established custom, and that the authors are right in saying that there never has been any generally admitted diplomatic tongue. The same differences continue, with even greater vigour, in our own time; for almost every nation now uses its own language only for its despatches. England habitually employed French for diplomatic purposes down to the end of the last century, but in 1800 the Foreign Office began to write in English to the Ambassadors resident in London; and, when Lord Castlereagh joined the Allied Armies as representative of Great Britain, he used English for all his communications to his European colleagues. At a later period Mr. Canning ordered several of the British Ministers abroad to adopt their own language for their official communications to the Courts to which they were accredited, but authorised them to add a translation. This latter permission was suppressed by Lord Aberdeen in

1851, on the ground that despatches ought to be laid before Parliament in the exact words in which they were presented. The German Diet decided in 1817 to employ German (adding a translation in French or Latin) for all its foreign communications.

Next to the choice of speech comes the graver and far more complicated question of shapes of composition. This element of the subject is so vast that the mere list of names of the documents in diplomatic use is long enough to provide reading for a winter evening. Each country has its own denominations for the various forms which it supposes to be essential to the conduct of its international relations; and it will be conceived, without an effort, that when all these descriptions are multiplied by the twelve or thirteen languages which possess them, and when local practices are added to the account, it presents rather a startling total. The French diplomatic manual alone contains 416 separate types and models. We English have a tolerable collection of our own, enough to cause no small worry to the servants of the Crown who have to fill them up; but taken as a whole, we are certainly less afflicted with this particular class of suffering than Continentals are. The consequence of our comparative exemption from the tyranny of red tape and rules is, however, that most of us remain totally unlearned in the mysteries and meanings of the words which designate the various manuscripts employed in foreign chancelleries. It is possible that we all may know (though, frankly, it is scarcely likely) the exact signification of Bull, Brief, and Protocol, of Capitulations, Cartels, and Conclusums, of Exequaturs and Concordats; but how many are there of us who can explain offhand the nature of all the im

plements, and shapes and shades of action which have been or still are employed by nations towards each other? How many are there of us who can define, for instance, the exact distance between a Rescript and a Pragmatic Sanction; between the Golden Bull and a Placetum Regium? or who can tell, without looking at a dictionary, what are the diplomatic meanings of sub spe rati, pro memoriá, or in petto; what is a Verbal Note, a mémoire, or a reversale; what is a Firman and what a Hatti Sherif; or what is the precise distinction between Federates and Confederates, and between a Nation and a State? It is true that many of the things described by these half archeological nomenclatures are of but little use; that they mainly serve to show the vanity of nations, and are preserved, like ceremonial, for the greater glory of realms and sovereigns. But they constitute one of the elements of Forms, one of the manifestations of international pretensions: for this reason, and also because they are not altogether unamusing, it is worth while to explain them here. It may be as well, however, to observe that scarcely any of the hard names which have just been interrogatively enumerated are employed or needed in the daily humdrum of embassies or ministries: they only come in exceptionally. The ordinary labour of attachés includes no Latin now; it is very much like work in an office anywhere, for-mournful as it is to own it-copying letters and the rule of three constitute its main elements. But still attachés have to know-or rather, are supposed to know the answers to the foregoing questions; if they are ignorant, all they have to do is to go into the library, look for the right book (the librarian will tell them which it is), and inform their