and foibles of the profession at that period are there mirrored. When
he (still as Sir James Harris) reports the coming of a new French
Minister to St. Petersburg, he expresses the hope that the new envoy
will not be so difficult to deal with as the present chargé d’affairs,
“who, though he has a very moderate capacity, got access to all the
valets de chambre and inferior agents in the Russian houses, who very
often conjured up evil spirits where I least of all expected them.” A
little later he reports to the British Foreign Minister, Lord Stormont,
as follows: “If, on further inquiry, I should find, as I almost
suspect, that my friend’s (Prince Potemkin) fidelity has been shaken,
or his political faith corrupted, in the late conferences, by any
direct offers or indirect promises of reward, I shall think myself, in
such a case, not only authorized but obliged to lure him with a similar
bait.” He reminds His Lordship of the fact that Prince Potemkin is
immensely rich and that, therefore, perhaps as much may be required as
de Torcy offered to the Duke of Marlborough (two million francs).
In a letter of June 25, 1781, Sir James Harris, writing to the same
Minister, speaks of having obtained information of the conclusion
of a secret treaty between Russia and Austria from the confidential
secretary of a Russian minister. He adds: “I trust I shall keep him to
myself, since I have lost almost all my other informers by being outbid
for them by the French and Prussians.” He adds that it is painful to
him that the secret service expenses come so very high but he explains
that the avid corruption of the court is ever increasing and that
his enemies are favored by the fact that they can join in the expense
against him, their courts moreover supplying them most lavishly. He
adds: “They are also much more adroit at this dirty business than I am,
who cannot help despising the person I corrupt.”
The Foreign Minister of Russia at this time, and for many years before
and after, was Count Panin. It was then suspected and is now known
that he was firmly bought by Frederick II. But there has been some
doubt as to whether he entered upon this corrupt relation behind the
back of Empress Catherine or at her bidding. It is known that she
often encouraged her ministers at foreign courts to accept bribes and
apparently to sell themselves to foreign governments, because through
the relationship of confidence thus established they might gather
information useful to their own government. This is one of the many
ways in which the game of corruption tended to defeat itself.
As far as the letters of this period deal with diplomatic policies
they are no more reassuring than when they relate the details of
diplomatic practice. On August 16, 1782, Sir James Harris made a long
confidential report to Lord Grantham. He observes that Count Panin
is powerfully assisting the King of Prussia, the French Minister is
artful and intriguing, working through Prince Potemkin and the whole
tribe of satellites which surrounded the Empress, whom he calls “barber
apprentices of Paris.” He then unfolds his own policy of winning the
favor of the Empress for England by giving her the island of Minorca
as a present. His idea had been adopted by the British Foreign Office
and he writes, “Nothing could be more perfectly calculated to the
meridian of this Court than the judicious instructions I received on
this occasion.” He decided,--hand in hand with the proposed cession
of Minorca,--to designate the Empress as a friendly mediatrix between
England and Holland; he says: “I knew, indeed, she was unequal to the
task but I knew too how greatly her vanity would be flattered by this
distinction.” Farther on he reports how, gradually, after several
British Ministers had incurred the ill humor of Catherine, Fox and
the present Minister of Foreign Affairs have finally found favor and
smoothed the road for Sir James. He hopes that all these great efforts
and sacrifices may result in “lighting the strong glow of friendship
in Her Imperial Majesty in favor of England.” At this distance a slim
result of so much effort. The characterization of Catherine with which
he closes, few historians would now accept.[A]
[A] “With very bright parts, an elevated mind, an uncommon
sagacity, she wants judgment, precision of ideas,
reflection, and l’esprit de combinaison.”
American diplomats had their first taste of European diplomatic methods
in 1797, when Pinckney, Gerry and Marshall were sent to France on their
special mission. Every attempt at delay and mystification was practised
on them. After various secret agents had tried the patience of the
Americans and had finally come out with the plain demand of Talleyrand
for a million francs as the price for peace and good relations, they
resolutely turned their back on Paris. Meanwhile Pitt was seriously
considering buying peace on similar terms.
III
AFTER THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA
The convulsions of the French revolution and the Napoleonic conquests
did not seem materially to affect the principles and practices of
diplomacy. When the Congress of Vienna met to rearrange the state
of Europe, it was guided by men who still looked upon diplomacy
entirely in the manner of the 18th century, when, in the words of
Horace Walpole, “it was the mode of the times to pay by one favor for
receiving another.” The idea of restoring the balance of Europe or
patching up the rents and cracks in the old system which had been so
severely shaken was the purpose which animated these men. They viewed
everything from the dynastic interests of their respective rulers and
traded off lesser kingdoms and slices of territory with the same spirit
of the gamester that has always characterized the absolutist diplomacy.
Of the three master minds of the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand,
Metternich and Pozzo di Borgo, it may indeed be said that they
illustrated both the qualities and the vices of the old diplomacy in a
superlative degree. The last named has characterized Talleyrand as “a
man who is unlike any other. He wheedles, he arranges, he intrigues,
he governs in a hundred different manners every day. His interest in
others is proportioned to the need which he has of them at the moment.
Even his civilities are luxurious loans which it is necessary to repay
before the end of the day.” Talleyrand, himself, has said: “Two things
I forbid--too much zeal and too absolute devotion--they compromise
both persons and affairs.” He did not, indeed, betray his great master
Napoleon, he only quitted him in time.
Metternich, who resembled Talleyrand in the complete self-control of
a passionless diplomat, had a long and brilliant, but essentially
sterile, career. His correspondence shows a keen and luminous spirit
with a great mastery of detail, and capacity for manipulating the human
pawns; but there is no deep insight, no real constructive policy.
Indeed, he supported Alexander I in his efforts for a Holy Alliance or
sacred league among nations, but it was conceived in such a form that
it would not have interfered with the traditional game of diplomacy.
Metternich indeed often pays his compliments to the ideal, as when he
praises the league as resting on the same basis as the great Christian
society of man, namely, the precept of the Book of Books, “Do unto
others as you would that they should do unto you.” But the details of
his policy were governed entirely by the barren principles of balance
of power and legitimacy, and showed an utter disregard for the natural
and ethnic facts underlying government. Metternich indeed himself at
times realized the vanity of political intrigue, as when he wrote to
his daughter from Paris in 1815, “This specific weight of the masses
will always be the same, while we, poor creatures, who think ourselves
so important, live only to make a little show by our perpetual motion,
by our dabbling in the mud or in the shifting sand.”
When Alexander himself left the realm of vague ideals and descended to
details, his impulses often took a form somewhat like the proposal made
to Castlereagh at Vienna, “We are going to do a beautiful and grand
thing. We are going to raise up Poland by giving her as king one of my
brothers or the husband of my sister.” The British statesman does not
seem to have been immediately carried away with this generous design.
It was consistent with the character and temper of the Congress
of Vienna that there flowed in it innumerable currents and
counter-currents of intrigue. In January, 1815, the representatives of
England, France and Austria agreed upon a secret treaty of alliance,
directed against Russia and Prussia. When Napoleon returned from Elba
he found this document and showed it to the Russian Minister before
tearing it up.
The first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by the
principles that had prevailed at Vienna. In the details of diplomatic
intercourse, indirection, bribery and deceit continue to prevail
although in a less flamboyant fashion than in the eighteenth century.
As the principle of nationalism comes more clearly to emerge, the
secrecy of diplomatic _methods_ is distinguished from the secrecy of
diplomatic _policy_ with increasing condemnation of the latter; a
greater sense of responsibility to the nation as a whole begins to show
itself, and the traditional resources of diplomacy are no longer quite
adequate.
Nevertheless, the diplomatic literature of the age still looks upon
diplomacy as essentially a tactical pursuit, conditioned by the
continuous enmity of states. The French writer, Garden, in his _Traité
de diplomatie_, gives the following elucidation: “Put on this plane,
diplomacy becomes like a transcendent manœuvering of which the entire
globe is the theater, where states are army corps, where the lines of
combat change unceasingly, and where one never knows who is a friend,
and who is an enemy. It is a political labyrinth in the midst of
which ability alone is capable of moving with ease and without being
smothered by detail.”
The memoirs and anecdotal literature of the period afford numerous
instances of the persistence of that desire for cleverness in dealing
with secrets, which often brings about amusing incidents.
At the time when Frankfort was the capital of the North German
Confederation, the Austrian government provided its representative
there (Count Rechberg) with duplicate instructions; one to the effect
that he must exhaust every energy to maintain the most friendly
and mutually helpful relations with Prussia; the other of quite
the opposite tenor. The former was to be shown to the Prussians.
Unfortunately, at the critical moment the Austrian Minister showed the
wrong letter to Bismarck, who guessed the situation; suppressing his
amusement as best he could, Bismarck tried to console the embarrassed
Austrian by promising not to take any advantage of the slip.
A Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs (Manteuffel) had hired a
police agent to sneak into the French Embassy in order to secure some
documents there. When he delightedly showed one of the letters secured
to General Von Gerlach, the latter said: “I could have written you ten
such letters for what this cost you.”
Disraeli, in a letter to his sister, spoke of the Danish Minister at
London as his secret agent in the diplomatic corps.
There were also more innocent means of gaining advantages such as are
practised in many other branches of human enterprise. For instance,
Labouchere relates his discovery, when attaché at Washington, that
Secretary Marcy was put in a terrible ill-humor whenever he lost at
whist. Upon a hint from Labouchere, the British Minister managed
thereafter regularly to lose in his games with Marcy who was immensely
pleased at “beating the British at their own game.” Labouchere adds:
“Every morning when the terms of the treaty were being discussed we had
our revenge and scored a few points for Canada.”
There was all this time an increasing tendency to discount the
importance of the traditional arts of diplomacy and to believe that
a great deal of this carefully nurtured secrecy was merely a trick of
the trade. Bismarck expressed himself in the following language on
diplomatic literature: “For the most part it is nothing but paper and
ink. If you wanted to utilize it for historical purposes, you could not
get anything worth having out of it. I believe it is the rule to allow
historians to consult the Foreign Office archives at the expiration of
thirty years (after the date of despatches). They might be permitted
to examine them much sooner, for the despatches and letters, when they
contain any information at all, are quite unintelligible to those
unacquainted with the persons and relations treated of in them.” In
reporting this statement, Labouchere observes: “If all foreign office
telegrams were published they would be curious reading.”[B] He also
relates how his youthful efforts at secret diplomacy were received by
the Foreign Office. He had succeeded at St. Petersburg in being able
quite regularly, through the assistance of a laundress, to get from
the government printing office loose sheets of confidential minutes of
State Council meetings. When Lord John Russell discovered the method in
which this interesting information was obtained, he put a stop to the
simple intrigue; Labouchere concludes his account of this experience
thus: “For what reason, I wonder, did Russell imagine diplomacy was
invented?”
[B] He writes that when “I was an attaché at Stockholm, the
present Queen, the Duchess of Ostrogotha, had a baby, and
a telegram came from the Foreign Office desiring that Her
Majesty’s congratulations should be offered, and that she
should be informed how the mother and child were. The
Minister was away, so off I went to the Palace to convey
the message and to inquire about the health of the pair. A
solemn gentleman received me. I informed him of my orders,
and requested him to say what I was to reply. ‘Her Royal
Highness,’ he replied, ‘is as well as can be expected, but
His Royal Highness is suffering a little internally, and
it is believed that this is due to the fact of the milk
of his nurse having been slightly sour last evening.’ I
telegraphed this to the Foreign Office.”
The term “secret diplomacy” is during this period used in a special
sense, referring to a secret intrigue on the part of a monarch
or minister without the knowledge of those who have the public
responsibility in the matter. Earlier monarchs often played their
own game without informing their ministers and attempted to keep the
threads of foreign intrigue in their own hands. Louis XV did great
injury to his country by pursuing this method.
Napoleon III was a great offender in this respect. Not only was his
international policy prone to unscrupulous attempts and proposals,
but he acted in these matters frequently without informing those who
were responsible before the country. Most of his secret advances to
Bismarck were made entirely on his own responsibility; he did not
inform the Foreign Minister, Ollivier, of the fateful instructions to
Benedetti to the effect that he should demand of Prussia assurances
that no German prince should ever again be suggested for the Spanish
throne; his Mexican policy, too, was worked out by himself, in
conjunction with the Duc de Morny and Jecker, the banker, rather than
with his ministers. The disastrous consequences of the secret diplomacy
of Napoleon III will be reverted to later on.
It has also repeatedly happened that envoys have incurred a strong
suspicion of playing a political game of their own without the
authorization or even the knowledge of their Foreign Minister. While
a diplomatic representative in taking such action risks disavowal
and dismissal, yet the temptation felt by a strong-willed man who
is confident that he knows the local situation and the needs of his
country there better than any one else, has often been too powerful
to be resisted. When the unauthorized action has been successful in
gaining some advantage, it has generally been condoned.[C] But though
the home government is at all times able theoretically to disavow
unauthorized actions of its foreign representatives, yet the latter
through their self-willed acts may have set in motion forces which can
no longer be controlled. Very often also doubt and confusion is cast on
the real causes of important events and a general feeling of suspicion
is thus generated.
[C] Frequently, indeed, ministers have been encouraged to make
certain démarches “on their own account”; if successful,
they could be sanctioned after the event. Such is the
procedure which Palmerston criticized in a letter to Lord
Clarendon (May 22, 1853):
“The Russian Government has always had two strings to its
bow--moderate language and disinterested professions at
Petersburg and at London; active aggression by its agents
on the scene of operations. If the aggressions succeed
locally, the Petersburg Government adopts them as a _fait
accompli_ which it did not intend, but cannot, in honor,
recede from. If the local agents fail, they are disavowed
and recalled, and the language previously held is appealed
to as a proof that the agents have overstepped their
instructions.”
One of the most self-willed of British Ministers was Stratford Canning
(Lord Stratford de Redcliffe). It is generally accepted that his
personal diplomacy at Constantinople, where he began his diplomatic
career in 1808 and where he ended it in 1858 after various intervening
missions, was one of the causes which brought on the Crimean war.
After reciting that Lord Stratford constantly held private interviews
with the Sultan and did his utmost to alarm him, urging him to reject
accommodation with Russia, and promising him the armed assistance of
England, John Bright stated that all this was done without instructions
from the home government. Lord Clarendon wrote: “He is bent on war and
on playing the first part in settling the great Eastern question.” When
the war came on, Lord Granville wrote: “We have generals whom we do not
trust, and whom we do not know how to replace. We have an Ambassador at
Constantinople, an able man, a cat whom no one cares to bell, whom some
think a principal cause of the war, others the cause of some of the
calamities which have attended the conduct of the war; and whom we know
to have thwarted or neglected many of the objects of his Government.”
Labouchere, who served under Lord Stratford in 1862, wrote afterwards
that the despatches of Stratford during the Crimean war could not
be recognized as the originals from which Mr. Kinglake drew his
material for a narrative of the ambassador’s career.[D] He thought
that Stratford’s great power at Constantinople was due to his long
stay there which made it necessary for the Turks to remain on good
terms with him. Labouchere also claims that Lord Stratford misled
his own government by getting the Sultan to publish certain reform
decrees which he would send home as evidence of good government, never
explaining that such decrees were entirely dead letters.
[D] Labouchere wrote: “Lord Stratford was one of the most
detestable of the human race. He was arrogant, resentful
and spiteful. He hated the Emperor Nicholas because he had
declined to accept him as Ambassador to Russia and the
Crimean war was his revenge. In every way he endeavored to
envenom the quarrel and to make war certain.”
The danger and disadvantage of having a diplomat or ruler inject his
personal ambitions and dislikes into his diplomacy have, unfortunately,
been frequently exemplified. With respect to the causes of the Crimean
war, it will be remembered that Napoleon III had a personal grudge
against Emperor Nicholas who had addressed him “Sire and Good Friend”
instead of “Brother” as is customary among monarchs. Though Napoleon
answered him, acknowledging the compliment implied from the fact that
one may choose one’s friends but not one’s brothers, yet he never
forgot the slight.
Lord Palmerston as Foreign Minister quite openly regarded himself as a
power independent not only of Parliament but of the Cabinet itself, and
not bound to consult his colleagues provided he could justify himself
later before the House of Commons. But when in December, 1851, he had
entirely on his own responsibility approved the _coup d’état_ by
which Napoleon III made himself emperor, Lord John Russell instantly
dismissed him and thus vindicated the rule that the Foreign Minister
must always pay regard to the joint responsibility of the Cabinet.
In 1861 a select committee of Parliament on the diplomatic service
was appointed. It took evidence, among other things, on the existence
of “secret diplomacy” in the British service. By this term was
understood private correspondence or private action affecting the
conduct of public affairs, which did not become part of the record
in the ministry. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the Earl of Clarendon,
Lord Cowley, and Lord John Russell, all gave evidence with respect to
the conduct of business by private correspondence. They all seemed to
agree that private correspondence between the Foreign Minister and the
individual representatives abroad was useful and even necessary for
supplementing the formal instructions and reports. But they stated
their belief that whenever any such private correspondence should begin
to affect the actual conduct of public affairs it would certainly get
into the record; if, however, it should come to nothing, then it might
not be referred to in public despatches.
IV
NAPOLEON III, DISRAELI, BISMARCK
We have so far been dealing primarily with the methods of diplomacy.
During the old régime both the methods and the general policy of
diplomatic action were controlled by the secret councils of the monarch
and of a few ministers. With the growth of representative government
public opinion began to concern itself more directly with foreign
affairs. There grew up gradually, although with many relapses and
with many breaks of continuity, a consensus that while the methods
of diplomatic action might be secret, the general trend of policy
should regularly be laid before the representatives of the people
who should also be informed of any individual action involving the
responsibilities of the nation. When, therefore, in contemplating the
history of the last one hundred years, secret diplomacy is spoken
of in condemnatory terms, the attempted secrecy of national foreign
_policy_, rather than of methods, is usually thought of. When important
engagements are undertaken which involve the nation in responsibility
to others, particularly for the use of armed forces; when by a series
of specific acts a tendency is given to foreign policy which is not
avowed to the representatives of the people; then there exists secret
diplomacy in a reprehensible sense. A further method of concealment
works through a false statement of motives. Often narrowly selfish
action has been camouflaged with the avowal of noble aims and high
ideals; or there has been fencing for position in order that at the
beginning of a war the opprobrium of being the assailant could be
thrown on the other party. Undoubtedly sometimes statesmen may persuade
themselves of the presence of high motives in matters in which their
specific action or that of their successors, working with the same
materials, takes on a contrary direction.
At the conclusion of the Crimean war, Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord
Clarendon (March 1, 1867) as follows: