from failure. A decade less than one hundred years afterwards, at Geneva, his grandson, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, maintained the family tradition by doing the Old Country a like good turn, and by supporting the withdrawal of the indirect claims from the arbitration tribunal (Lord Fitzmaurice's Granville, II, 98). The 'Alabama' proceedings at Washington first introduced to the English Commissioners the man who was afterwards to open the list of Ambassadors to the Court of St. James's. This was Mr. T. F. Bayard, described by Sir Stafford Northcote to Lord Granville as 'Really a very nice fellow indeed.'

The viewy and ingenious Laurence Oliphant, working on the lines marked out originally by David Urquhart, set some pamphleteering agencies in motion for the instruction of a select few on the true inwardness of the Eastern question - Far and Near. During Mr. Bayard's ambassadorial period in London, some thoughtful and patriotic international students, on both sides of the Atlantic, formed a society for promoting the peaceful settlement of controversies that if allowed to drift might end in war. In London, the high character of the support given to the scheme may be judged from the fact of its chief English supporter being Sir Robert Herbert, as Under-Secretary, responsible for so much of our Colonial success. The Americans, collaborating with him on the other side, included men of Herbert's calibre, who some time before had discussed the project with the inventive and resourceful Allan Thorndike Rice. These unofficial Anglo-American diplomatists, to the great advantage of multiplying readers, continued publishing their flyleaf, after the fashion advised by Rice, when editor of the North American Review, though he did not live to see his idea materialize.

The American agency just men

VOL. 13-NO. 679

tioned illustrated the possibilities of the present by the endeavors of the past. Fresh details about the Confederation of Nations, proposed to the second Pitt by the Russian Alexander I, prepared the Anglo-Saxon world for President Wilson's League of Nations. The social and political interest thus generated was accompanied or followed by a rediscovery of the lessons in national and international construction; to be learned from the stages by which the men who wrote or inspired The Federalist built up the United States Constitution in its home and foreign aspect. The chief novelty, perhaps, in President Wilson's comity of peoples is the admission of broad daylight into the subterranean passages of diplomacy.

International business, like other business, social or commercial, of an equally complex kind, cannot be profitably transacted to the accompaniment of a babel of tongues. Whatever the subject matter, the interests of the many must be committed to a capable and expert few. What the individuals or communities thus represented have a right to know, is the object aimed at, the line taken for its accomplishment, and the responsibilities fastened upon the onlookers who have to bear the cost, that knowledge involves a right of veto. That may well serve to bring back the words in which (Chesterfield, 1901) Lord Rosebery cautioned his countrymen against entanglement by any of their foreign neighbors in the network of Continental diplomacy in general, and against the recurring risk of secret treaties. Two circumstances helped to give those conventions a bad name. The first was the use made of them by the third Stuart King, for accepting the French Monarch as his paymaster. The second reason for their discredit showed itself in the manner and object of their employment by

Prussia, which during the eighteenth century preceded the Court of the Tsar as a centre and school of European diplomacy. These treaties, however, proved indispensable to the settlement of modern Europe, including England, since without their aid Sir William Temple, in 1668, could not have effected the Triple Alliance (England, Holland, Sweden) against Louis XV, nor, in 1677, William of Orange's marriage with the Princess Mary. So, again, Marlborough's victories, under Queen Anne, would have accomplished nothing without in the next reign the conspiracies between the negotiators devised by Bolingbroke. In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht came forth from a series of plottings behind closed doors of two or three men who entirely understood each other from the first, and who personified the international spirit of the time quite as effectively as the august brigands who forty-eight years later arranged (1761) the family compact between France and Spain.

During the first half of Queen Victoria's reign, some of the foreign policy debaters in both Houses had been trained in the diplomatic schools now recalled. The best-known occasion on which the secret treaty question then came up followed the Crimean War, and related to a mysterious FrancoAustrian understanding, engineered, as Disraeli suggested, by England, that in the Russian hostilities, Austria, if she did not hold entirely aloof, would take no step against France. Palmerston describing the whole story as a mare's nest left the matter practically where it began. Since 1878, the year of the Cyprus Convention, clandestine agreements about matters farther East have seldom, if ever, come before Parliament. President Wilson and Lord Rosebery, it will be seen, are equally against subterranean settlements between the Foreign Offices of the world.

How, then, are the representatives of the people to be kept in touch with the doings of the diplomatists? In the post-war period we are sure to hear much about Foreign Office novelties that will at once strengthen and democratize our external statesmanship. What the place at that uncertain date will be is a matter of guess. As for the past no one doubts that the nervously asked question: 'What will the House of Commons say?' has been on all these matters the most fruitful cause of inefficiency, of delays, mistakes, and even disasters. These experiences long since set the more thoughtful of official intelligences, conversant with St. Stephen's, on considering whether and where a remedy for the evil might be found. Nothing better suggested itself than a Committee of Foreign Affairs on the American and French system. In this way the framers and conductors of our foreign policy would take the popular Chamber into their confidence. The Committee, carefully chosen from its members, would be sworn to secrecy; they would have the right of seeing papers and of consulting the permanent officials. The Foreign Minister would be bound to ask their advice, though not necessarily to follow it. Elected by the whole House, they would periodically report progress to their brother members. Such is the bare outline of a scheme for securing popular control over our international statesmanship, which on the first blush of it, however impracticable, might perhaps be put into working shape. One thing is certain, more than two million voters of both sexes combined have been added to the electorate. Among the recently enfranchised, a considerable proportion will prove more pertinaciously inquisitive about Ministerial doings abroad, not less than at home, more disinclined to take 'Yes' or 'No' for an answer than any

earlier occupants of the green leather benches. At the same time, too, there has opened an entirely fresh epoch in the political education of the country. The aggregate of influence collectively exercised by the new journalism, price one halfpenny, at least equals, and probably exceeds, that wielded by the press, in what some might call its palmiest period. There is, however, to-day no broad sheet speaking with the authority of the Times during the Victorian age, before its owners had done for it what Socrates did for philosophy brought it down from the Gods to men. From 1841 till 1876, J. T. Delane sat in Printing House Square with the fingers of one hand on the pulse of public opinion and the other open to receive relays of information from Downing Street councils or foreign dispatches from Continental statesmen who were making the European history of their age. Then came the editorial conferences with Reeve, Gallenza, Dasent, and Lowe. The next morning the ten-pound householders and their Parliamentary representatives received the deliverance of John Walter's journal on international issues with unquestioning faith, as the classical Greek once heard the response of the Delphic oracle. The shrewdest of Victorian editors had no axe of his own, whether in connection with Mart or Cabinet, to grind; he took care that none of his writers should have axes of their own either. As a consequence, his readers knew instinctively that everything which it concerned them to hear about the doings of British statesmanship beyond seas was conveyed in the handsome sheet, owned by the Walters, easy to read, pleasant to handle, and, after a fashion, gratifying to their patriotic vanity, forming an impressive contrast to the fragile and poverty-stricken 'rags' patronized by the brown-paper, cigarette-smoking

foreigners, who bought their national news sheets for about one twelfth of the charge formerly made for a single copy of the Times in the seedy shops abutting on Leicester Square. Newspaper readers of the old school resented, as savoring of impiety, the challenge to the costly organ of the upper middle class thrown down by a popularly priced press. Jupiter, Junior, however (Charles Austin's name for the earliest and ablest of the new journals, the Daily Telegraph), turned out so little of a leveler, as to become the colleague rather than the rival of the original great Jove himself. As foreign correspondents, Whitehurst and Beatty Kingston worked with the Times' men. For the Standard and Daily News Mrs. Emily Crawford and Hely Bowes were quite as authentic and readable about movements of every kind as the great Blowitz himself.

Since then, and particularly during the present war time, new methods have been found to satisfy and instruct the indisputably growing appetite for international knowledge. The Local Government Acts of 1888 have produced, not only an entirely new kind of municipal machinery, still on its trial, but a race of municipal magnates bent upon exercising an entirely new influence on the daily life of their fellow citizens, and supplying them in the shape of lectures and flyleafs with the knowledge that shall guide them to an intelligent opinion on the questions now convulsing the world. The mayor of to-day is the Parliamentary candidate of to-morrow; he aspires the day after to represent his borough at Westminster. Meanwhile, His Worship serves his generation and keeps himself well in the running for a birthday honor by encouraging at essay clubs and debating societies attention to the external concerns of his native land. On a humbler level, in the workshops and fac

tories of the Midlands and the North, the same subject, thanks to the great events now in progress from day to day, enters, as it never did before, into the tobacco parliaments of the dinner hour, and after the day's work is over, is prominent in fireside talk, or in the select gatherings of the 'private bar.' This process of self-education began with the war among the industrial classes. Since then it has never ceased for a moment. As a consequence, foreign politics, including our diplomacy and its makers, will cause a good deal of heckling whenever and wherever the next electoral caucuses are held. Sir Henry Austin Lee's retrospect, when it appears in print, will no doubt recall the best known of those near enough to him to be called his contemporaries. Of these the most brilliant among our then younger Ambassadors, Sir Fairfax Cartwright, represented his country at Vienna till a year before the war broke out; Sir Maurice de Bunsen was also at the Austrian capital during this period. Those of ambassadorial rank still in active service include, at Madrid, Sir Arthur Hardinge; and at Rome, Sir Rennell Rodd. Both of these have had the advantage of personal contact with Anglo-American diplomacy, and ever since they entered the public service have shown a wholesome consciousness of their responsibility, not only to their chiefs at Whitehall, but to every branch of those national interests which our representatives abroad, if they keep their eyes and ears open, seldom want opportunities to advance.

During the progress of this writing another proof has been given that the new at the Foreign Office is apt to turn out only the old. At the beginning of the eighteenth century William Pitt the First had for his most intimate friend at Eton and Oxford, Gilbert West, remembered, if at all to-day, less The Fortnightly Review

for his translation of Pindar, than for those Observations of the Resurrection, in which, as was done about the same time by the first Lord Lyttelton, when dealing with St. Paul, he recanted his early Deism and declared his acceptance of the entire Gospel narrative. The two had made the grand tour together; after the fashion of the time for young men of quality, something of amateur diplomacy had been done, with more or less success, by both, and especially by West. Returning for his degree to Christchurch, he found himself one among a select few newlyfledged graduates, singled out by the Minister of the day for the offer of a promising position in the Foreign Service. Since then successive governments have been in the habit of reserving army cadetships for University candidates. Now a revival seems likely of Oxford and Cambridge nominees for the Foreign Office. Sir Cecil SpringRice owed something of his early success as Ambassador at Washington to his friend, Mr. Roosevelt. His rare personal endowments, including his graceful scholarship, left an impression on American society, which still survives. Now Mr. J. P. Morgan and one or two other favorites of fortune are honoring their old friend's memory, as well as investing the Anglo-Saxon Entente with a new feature, by raising a fund, which after due provision for Sir Cecil Spring-Rice's family, will institute scholarships at Balliol to help their winners in qualifying by travel and through other agencies for the career to which the founder was prematurely lost. The British government can scarcely be a mere spectator of all this, or avoid a closer connection of itself with the profession that increasingly needs the best brains with which it can be strengthened and renovated by our seats of learning - old or new.

To any collector of old letters it is a source of unfeigned regret that today furnishes hasty scrawls or typewritten screeds instead of the delightful epistles of old days. Personally I have never been able to discover why this is so; there are, after all, the same number of hours in each day, and the numberless ways in which we do things more quickly and less elaborately from traveling to dressingwould suggest that we had more, and not less, time at our disposal. But how few real letters do we either write or receive! And when we do get them, as at rare intervals it still happily happens, do we value them as we ought?

I have before me an example of the pious care with which Dr. Hook, Vicar of Leeds, guarded a letter from Wordsworth. It is written on one side of a big sheet in a large hand rather quickly on August 2, 1838. Its purport is among other things to explain that

he cannot offer the Hooks hospitality under his roof at that moment, as much of his home is unroofed for the purpose of adding to it. On the other side, as well as the address, are several of the sonnets cut from the newspaper and pasted on the letter's reverse; there is also the sonnet on the projected railway from Kendal to Windermere, carefully copied out, signed, and dated. I bought the whole thing many years ago, on the basis that only the letter was genuine. Last summer an expert was going through my collection, and gave it as his opinion that the sonnet was also in the handwriting

of Wordsworth, dated and signed by him. The writing is much more careful, as undoubtedly would be the case in copying a poem for a friend, for Dr. Hook must have kept the letter six years, and then taken it to Wordsworth and asked him to write out the sonnet on its back, sign it, and date it on the occasion, October 12, 1844. This, of course, greatly adds to the value of my possession, and was quite unexpected at the time of purchase.

The handwriting of Cowper flows beautifully along the large pages, just as his words follow each other without haste or halt:

To Samuel Rose, Esq.

Chancery Lane, London. Decr. 1, 1791. My dear Friend, - On application made this morning to your last letter but one, with much amazement I perceive that, though you have not reminded me of the omission in your last, it still remains unanswered. At least if I have answer'd it, my memory has entirely let slip the matter, which, bad as it is, I think is hardly quite so treacherous. It is a wonder that I should forget so far as to doubt about it, because in that letter you mention your encrease of business, which gave me the sincerest pleasure, and it was my purpose to have told you so immediately, because to express the joy we feel in the success of a friend, is itself a pleasure.

I thank you much for the intelligence sent me by William Throckmorton concerning the sale of my volumes: from Johnson I hear nothing, and should therefore have been left to vague conjectures, but for your information. Months ago, I desired him to send me all that either he or Fuseli could collect or think of that might assist me in the Milton way, but he has sent me noth