her lifetime the best reward of her pains, in his successful progress at school and college. He gained the Newcastle scholarship at Eton in 1847, and a Balliol scholarship in 1848; and in the same year in which his mother died he took a double first-class degree at Oxford. He was passionately devoted to literature, to Philology in particular; and was engaged in preparations for the new English Dictionary projected by the Philological Society when his career came to an untimely end in 1861. During his fatal illness, his sister tells us, learning 'was to him as to her [his mother], a shield from the monotony of the sick room, and an exceeding great reward.'

ART. III.-1. Report from the Select Committee on the Diplomatic Service. Printed 1861.

2. Report from the Select Committee on the Diplomatic and Consular Services. Printed 1870-71.

3. The Foreign Office List. By E. HERTSLET. 1873.

OUR

UR Diplomatic Service cannot complain of neglect. From the days of the great Administrative Reform movement it has been constantly attacked, investigated, defended, and remodelled. Whether on the whole it has suffered most from friends or foes is a point upon which its members are apparently much divided; but they are all bound to confess that it has received an immense deal of public attention, and that its history and its hopes are recorded in voluminous Blue Books at the public expense.

The late Lord Clarendon said, when examined before the Committee of 1870: I think that the sort of stigma that has 'been thrown upon the Diplomatic Service, and the sort of general disposition that there has been on the part of the public and the press, resulting simply from want of information, has been very discouraging to the members of the 'diplomatic body; and that they will be just as well satisfied as I am that the realities of their service and of their work 'should be brought out in much the best way in which they can be brought out, namely, by examination before an 'impartial Committee.'

The evidence given before this and a former Committee has been recorded in Blue Books; but Blue Books, however interesting, are generally avoided even by the reading public. We believe therefore that we may serve a good purpose by devoting a few pages to the consideration of the facts elicited

by the Parliamentary Committees, and of the results to which the reports of the Committees have led.

It may not be unnatural to inquire at the outset why the want of information alluded to by Lord Clarendon should have been accompanied by the violent hostility which was exhibited towards the Diplomatic Service. A considerable portion of it was no doubt at one time due to the unenviable notoriety gained by an individual who attacked it wholesale and retail from personal motives, and who threw at it as much mud as he could in the well-founded expectation that some of it would stick. But there are other reasons why the Diplomatic Service should be specially liable to attack and to unpopularity. To many Englishmen the unearthing and hunting down a job is a congenial sport. It is an occupation and an amusement; it has all the interest and ferocity of the chase, and is encouraged by a feeling of patriotism nearly equal to that which sustains a M. F. H. in his arduous duties. We must allow that the job-hunter who has started a diplomatist may easily and not unnaturally persuade himself that he is on the right scent. He sees before him a man enjoying a large salary, giving balls and dinners and living in the best society of a foreign capital; he knows nothing of the duties which the diplomatist has to perform, nor of the expenses which reduce his nominal salary to almost nothing; what then can be more reasonable than to conclude that he is an official favourite who consumes the public money upon his private pleasures-that he is, in short, a job? The job-hunter is, no doubt, a very useful member of society; but he is gullible; and, as too much knowledge of facts might spoil his sport, his conclusions are no more to be trusted than that of a game-keeper about vermin.'

6

Another class from whose ignorance of his proper functions the diplomatist suffers many things are the British tourists. Few persons who have not had some opportunity of verifying the fact can conceive the amount of unnecessary trouble which Brown, Jones, and Robinson give to our representatives abroad. They expect him to recover their lost luggage; to procure the suspension of laws or the alteration of police. regulations for their convenience; to ask them to dinner; and, above all, to procure for their wives and daughters introductions into societies far more exclusive than those to which in England neither their social position nor their connexions would permit them to aspire. Our Ministers do, as indeed they should do, much to assist the British tourists in their difficulties; but many of the things demanded of them are simply

impossible; and Brown, Jones, and Robinson, disappointed and angry, return home to pronounce their representatives useless impostors, and to swell the cry of the job-hunter.

There is yet another class who may generally be reckoned as hostile to the Diplomatic Service; it consists of the speculators who, in hopes of large profits, lend money to, or accept contracts from, bankrupt or repudiating Governments, and who, when threatened with the loss which they had risked, call loudly upon the British Minister to recover their money.

Of all this it may be said that such hostility is to a certain degree the lot of every man in a responsible official position. All Governments and all individual officials are exposed to the unpopularity caused by their failing to attain that omniscience and omnipotence for which people see fit to give them credit; but the Diplomatist lies under this peculiar disadvantage, that his failures most frequently come to light, and that his greatest successes are generally unknown beyond the range of red boxes. A good diplomatist must have the tact and manners which will gain him the confidence and good will of the men among whom he is thrown; men generally differing from himself in education, religion, principles, and habits of thought; he must possess the calm judgment necessary for distinguishing truth from falsehood, and important from trivial questions in the midst of the political mirage by which he is often surrounded; he must know how to communicate, faithfully and without exaggeration, to his Government the secret information he has gained, and how to convey confidential advice to the Government to which he is accredited. He must have acquired, above all, the happy knack of removing difficulties and settling differences so quietly that the very fact of their having existed should, if possible, remain unnoticed. The chief merit of his peaceful triumphs frequently consists in their being unknown, and the ignorance on the part of the public of his name and doings is often the truest measure of his success.

Having said thus much upon the causes which operate unfavourably upon public opinion respecting the Diplomatic Service and which prevent the reputation of its members from receiving fair play, we will proceed to examine its history and to consider the effect of the changes which Parliamentary Committees and Secretaries of State have, wittingly or unwittingly, worked in it. To do this it will not be necessary to trespass upon the sacred soil of archæology, to trace out the first recorded ambassador, or to discuss the nature of his duties and powers. We have no intention here of writing a history of diplomacy, and will therefore begin with the Diplomatic

Service as it existed within the memory of the diplomatists whose evidence was taken by the Parliamentary Committees now under our consideration.

'I believe,' writes Lord Cowley, 'that at the beginning of the present century, the only assistance afforded by the Government to the chief of an Embassy or Mission was that of a secretary; but the Ambassador or Minister was allowed to name a certain number of individuals who, on his recommendation, were officially recognised as attached to him, and whom he could employ on the public service as he might deem useful. The post of an attaché was constantly filled in those days by young men of family and fortune who desired to pass a few months agreeably abroad, and who could succeed in finding a friendly protector at some foreign Court. The consequence was that attachés were looked upon as the personal friends of the Ambassador or Minister. They formed part of his family, and lived at his table, and sometimes altogether in his house, which in itself was an equivalent to a limited salary. But, on the other hand, they were not considered as forming part of the permanent diplomatic staff of the country. The services they might render gave them no positive claim to promotion, and as a natural corollary the Ambassador or Minister could get rid of them should their conduct require it or his caprice dictate it.'

There can be no doubt that such a system presented advantages to the public in the selection of its diplomatic servants which no examinations have been able to replace. A comparatively larger number of young men were enabled to undergo that best of all examinations--practical work--and the subsequent selection was completely unfettered. To the young diplomatists themselves the advantages were also immense, as may readily be seen by contrasting the early career of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe with that of any British diplomatist of ten or twelve years' standing.

In July, 1807, Lord Stratford, then nineteen years of age, was appointed précis-writer to Mr. Canning; in October of the same year, he accompanied Mr. Merry, as Secretary, to his special mission to Copenhagen. He went in the same capacity with Mr. Adair to the Dardanelles in June, 1808, and in April, 1809, was appointed Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople. On the recall of Mr. Adair, he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary there in July, 1810. Forty years before that, Hugh Elliot was chargé d'affaires at Munich at two and twenty, and British Minister at the Court of the Great Frederic when he was twenty-six. Under the present system, an attaché may think himself fortunate if he becomes a third secretary in five years, and a second secretary in ten. Is it to be wondered at if, in face of such a contrast, we find

persons who regret the good old times,' or that even Mr. Hammond should express a doubt whether we have not gone 'too far in making diplomacy a profession, and that the old 'system of the Ambassador, taken generally from political men, and carrying as attachés his friends with him, giving them no 'eventual claim upon the public, may not have been better for 'the public service than that which now exists'?

The change which has taken place, though great, has been gradual. The extension of our diplomatic relations made the recall of heads of missions, at every change of Government, an inconvenience; the attachés therefore as well as their chiefs assumed more of the character of permanent officers; they acquired rights to employment, to pay, and to promotion; and diplomacy became, by a natural course of things, a profession.

But, in 1855, the job-hunters, under the name of Adminis'trative Reformers,' proclaimed aloud that the whole Civil Service was an idiot asylum for the sons and dependents of the aristocracy, and that it could only be properly filled by passing all future candidates through the ordeal of examinations. Unfounded and unjust as was this sweeping condemnation, it caught the ear of the British public at a moment when its anger had been roused by some administrative failures connected with the Crimean war, and the demand that all the world should be examined became too strong for any statesman to resist.

It seemed but a small thing to require that young men should pass a slight examination on entering upon a special career, and it was considered to be an advantage to diplomacy and a protection to the Secretary of State in making his appointments; but no person at the time had probably an idea that it would make Diplomacy into a regular close service, or that attachés, in proving their qualifications for their duties, would also acquire a strong sense of their rights. In December, 1855, then, Lord Clarendon made arrangements with the Civil Service Commissioners for the examination of candidates for the Diplomatic Service. They were required to write a good bold hand: to write English and French quickly and correctly from dictation: to translate French into English and English into French, and to speak French with tolerable ease and correctness: to translate well from either German, Spanish, Latin, or Italian: to have a general knowledge of geography: to make a clear précis of a collection of papers given to them at the examination: to have a general knowledge of modern history since the year 1789, and especially of the history of the country to which they were about to proceed. This list of sub