CHAPTER XXI

AMERICAN DIPLOMACY IN ENGLAND

I

The Ministers and Ambassadors who have represented the United States in England have an interest individually and as a body. So long a line of men, mostly distinguished, is almost a dynasty. Some of them are totally forgotten. Some are remembered faintly. Some have left a lasting impression. I have known a round dozen of them. The public memory is short. If I say that to Mr. Charles Francis Adams it was permitted to do a greater service to his country abroad than to any American since Franklin--or since his grandfather, John Adams, who might perhaps as a diplomatist be ranked above Franklin--if I say this, there are Americans to whom it will seem doubtful. But since Adams's greater service consisted in a just menace of war to England if she let loose the Alexandra, the current histories, written in days when every act of hostility to England was applauded, right or wrong, have done him justice. He was right, a thousand times right, and we cannot remember it too often.

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But what Americans ought also to remember is this, that when Mr. Adams flung his glove in Lord Russell's face it was done neither from temper nor impulse. It was the considered act of a Minister who had weighed all the chances, who had made up his mind that open war was better than covert hostility, and that it belonged to him to accept the responsibility. Whether Mr. Seward would have backed up his Minister may be a question, had the Minister's "This means war" been met by Lord Russell with "Then war it is." But the British Government knew--even Lord Palmerston knew--they were in the wrong; and they gave way. But they gave way only because Mr. Adams had put the alternative of war before them. It was very far from being his only service or his only triumph, but it was the greatest of all.

It is not too much to say that the diplomatic fortunes of the United States were in the hands of the American Minister to Great Britain from 1861 to 1863; and, indeed, to the end of the Civil War. A weak man, or an incompetent Minister, would have brought us to the dust. Adams, of course, was neither. He was a match for anybody in his business as Minister. He had the intellectual qualities and he had the personal qualities. Moreover, he was an Adams. He belonged to the governing classes, to one of the few great American families in whom the traditions and gifts of government are hereditary. The philosopher who divided the population of Massachusetts into {196} men, women, and Adamses made a strictly scientific distribution. The Adamses were of that minority which, under one name or another and in all countries alike, governs. It governs none the less when it sees fit to allow the democracy to believe itself all-powerful than when it takes command as an aristocracy.

I knew Mr. Adams. Mr. R. H. Dana, Jr., who smoothed so many paths for me, gave me a letter to him. This was in 1867. The days of tumult and conflict were over. His great work was done, but he remained Minister till 1868. The legation was then in Portland Place. Mr. Moran was Secretary of Legation; an excellent official whose service in that position in London lasted seventeen years, and was finally rewarded by promotion to Lisbon as Minister. He was a good watchdog. A secretary, of whatever rank, has to be that. Like Horatius, he has to keep the bridge, albeit, against his own countrymen. They are the Volscians. When I asked to see Mr. Adams Mr. Moran very properly wished to know why, and when I produced Mr. Dana's letter Mr. Moran seemed to think it was addressed to him, and not till I had explained that it was Mr. Dana's, who was Mr. Adams's friend, and that I had no other business than to present this letter, did Mr. Moran's vigilance relax. We became friends afterwards.

When I saw the Minister he departed a little from his official manner, greeted me kindly, and said: "You have brought me a very strong letter. What can I do for you?" When I thanked him {197} and said I wanted nothing, he relaxed a little further, laughed a little, and observed that most of his countrymen who called at the legation had an object. He talked with a singular precision; his was a mind of precision, like the modern rifle, equally good at short range and long if you adjust the sights. But good as was his talk, what impressed you most was the silent power of the man; the force in reserve, the solidity and the delicate temper of the metal.

I dwell a moment on the relations between travelling Americans and their legation or embassy--which to the untravelled may seem unimportant--because, now as much as ever and perhaps more than ever, the duties of a Minister, of an Ambassador, of the embassy, are so often misunderstood by that portion of the public from America which is intent on immediate admission to Buckingham Palace. I have known many secretaries since Mr. Moran's time. They have been, as a rule, willing and competent, really desirous to be of service to their countrymen.

There is no other embassy than the American on which such demands are made as on ours in London and in Paris, and to some extent in other capitals. These demands are addressed first of all to the Ambassador or Ambassadress. I will take a single instance. There is each year a large number of Americans who desire to be presented at Court, and who think it the duty of the Ambassador to arrange for their presentation. Many of these applications are sent by {198} letter well in advance of their coming. There are hundreds of such applications--literally hundreds; four or five hundred this year from American ladies who thought themselves, and were, worthy to appear before the King and Queen at one of the three Courts presently to be held. The number of presentations which the Ambassadress is entitled to make at each of the three Courts is four. That is a rule, an ordinance of the King who has the sole authority in such matters. Sometimes, in some special case, upon reason assigned, the rule is relaxed and a presentation may be made outside of it. But all such requests are rigidly scrutinized and the margin is very narrow. The exceptions are units.

In these circumstances, with four hundred candidates for four presentations, what is an unhappy Ambassadress to do? The American, used to the easy ways prevailing at the White House, supposes they must be equally easy at Buckingham Palace; or that, upon a word from the American Ambassador, in these days of pleasant Anglo-American relations, all doors will fly open. If they do not, each one of the four hundred regards hers, as a case for exceptional favour. She has come three thousand or four or six thousand miles in order to lend the distinction of her republican presence to these royal functions. What is an Ambassador for if not to give effect to these good intentions? The Lord Chamberlain stands at the door with a drawn sword, but is an American Ambassador to be intimidated by a mere officer of the Royal {199} Household? It is in vain to answer that even a King has a right to say whom he can receive and whom he cannot. _Le charbonnier est maître chez soi_, but not, they think, the King of England.

The perplexities arising out of this American eagerness to witness these royal splendours are innumerable. The resentment arising out of inevitable refusals is a burden which every Ambassador has to bear; and every secretary too. Grievances are of many kinds. It is not so many years since an American Minister was asked by cable--almost ordered--by a distinguished fellow-countryman to engage lodgings for him in London. It is not many more since an eminent statesman, arriving after Levees and Drawing-rooms were over, desired a secretary to arrange that he and his family should take tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle.

These are cases occurring not in musical comedy but in actual life. There are others, relating not to royalty but to society, and to various forms of English life. But it is already only too evident that the diplomatic duties of an Ambassador are not his only anxieties. The others, so far as I know anything about them, have always been borne cheerfully. Everything has been done for the American in London that could be done. He is taken care of to an extent that the Briton abroad never is, nor ever expects to be. But to all human effort there is a limit.

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II

MR. JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY

Since Mr. Adams's retirement in 1868 we have had three Ambassadors whose ability as diplomatists entitles them to places in the front rank. If you take account of other kinds of ability and of Ministers, there are more than three. Mr. Motley was a brilliant historian whose "Rise of the Dutch Republic" and "History of the United Netherlands" gave him a lasting European reputation and added distinction to American literature. But neither his six years of service as Minister to Austria, 1861-7, nor his year and a half in England, 1869-70, proved him a great diplomatist.

Austria was not then, and is not now, of the first importance from an American point of view. We respect her wise old Emperor. We do not, I think, agree with Mr. Gladstone in saying you can nowhere put your finger on the map and say, "Here Austrian rule has been beneficent." She never was a model to us and is not now. But since we like courage, and clear-sighted decision, and the recognition of facts, and like the men who have these gifts, we have not joined very heartily in the European outcry against the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We are a world-power for certain purposes only. We stand aloof from purely European complications. They are, as a rule, no affair of ours. We learned to our cost, or possibly our mortification, not very {201} long ago, that Austria, "effete" or not, was capable of giving us a lesson in diplomacy; or, at least, in diplomatic etiquette; by which we, or our late President, may or may not have profited.

Mr. Motley, though he wrote excellent dispatches and made no diplomatic or social mistakes in that difficult Austrian capital, had not the smooth temper or the patient arts which are essential to success at critical moments. He was impetuous, explosive, rhetorical; prone to interpret his instructions in the light of his own wishes or convictions. Socially he was a force, even in Vienna, because of his personal charm, his distinction of appearance and of manner. Socially speaking, he was an aristocrat. He was the first American Minister in London to establish himself in a house suitable to the dignity of the post, Lord Yarborough's, in Arlington Street. He was known to be Count Bismarck's friend. That of itself gave him a kind of celebrity, for Count Bismarck was then a comparatively unfamiliar personage in England, where the outlook of the average man on the Continental horizon is not wide.

One of the first questions Count Bismarck asked me when I first talked with him in the Wilhelmstrasse in 1866 was whether I knew Motley.

"Yes."

"Are you going to Vienna?"

"Yes."

"Then of course you will see Motley. Be sure you give him a message from me--a warm message. I have never forgotten our university days {202} together at Göttingen; our friendship. He knows that, but tell him again. And tell him I hope to see him in Berlin before he goes home."

As he spoke, there came into the eyes of the Iron Chancellor a look I had not seen before. The steel-blue softened into the blue of the skies; after rain, as the Chinese say. His friendship for Motley was an affectionate friendship. Later, I talked with Motley about Bismarck and of course delivered my message.

"Yes," said Motley, "we were boys together at Göttingen. His was a different life from mine. I dare say you have heard the stories about young Bismarck's exploits. In those matters he was like most students of his time and of his class. The Prussian Junker is a being by himself. But we became friends, and friends we have remained. We don't meet often, but the friendship has never died out nor decayed."

Another thing made Motley far otherwise popular in England; his passionate Americanism. Mr. Price Collier is of opinion that Englishmen do not like Americans. I do not agree with Mr. Collier, but, whether they do or not, they like an American to be an American. They liked Mr. Motley because his patriotism burst forth in all companies and at all times. It made him, or tended to make him, reluctant to compromise on any question where the interests of his country were concerned. But compromise is of the essence of diplomacy; most of all as between the greatest Powers of the World. If nobody ever yielded {203} anything, negotiations could end only in surrender or in war; the two things which it is the business of diplomacy to avoid. Nothing Motley ever did in diplomacy was of such service to his country as his two letters to _The Times_, early in the Civil War, and his memorable outburst in the Athenæum Club. To write the letters he violated the unwritten law of diplomacy, for he was then Minister to Austria. To make the Athenæum speech--for it was nothing less--he departed from the other unwritten law which makes a club neutral ground, and makes anything like an oration impossible.

But Motley had among other qualities the quality of courage. His invective in the Athenæum against the very classes among whose representatives he stood was magnificent, and it came very near being war, or a declaration of war. He would keep no terms with the men who were enemies of his country in such a crisis as that. If it had been anybody but Motley who thundered against the ignorance and prejudice of the Confederate allies who then gave the tone to English society, I imagine the Committee of the Club might have taken notice. But Motley fascinated while he rebuked. When he had done denouncing them as renegades to English ideas and enemies to liberty, they liked him the better. I can think of no incident so like this as Plimsoll's defiance of the House of Commons, when he rushed into the middle of the floor and charged his fellow-members with sacrificing the lives of English {204} sailors to the cupidity of English ship-owners, and so compelled the House to adopt the load-line.

History has taken note of Plimsoll's exploit. Motley's may never appear in pages which aim at historical dignity. But to this day, when near half a century has passed, Motley's is still remembered; still spoken of; still admired. There are men living who heard him. The English do not entirely like being reminded of their mistakes about us at that period, but they bear no malice against the man whose admonition did much to bring them to their senses. On the contrary, through all these forty-odd years, you might have heard Motley spoken of with admiring good-will.

Before all things, he loved his own country. Next to his own country, _longo intervallo_, he loved England, and it may be doubted whether we have ever sent a Minister, or anybody else to England whom the English themselves have loved as they loved Motley. His deep blue eyes shine starlike across all that interval of years. He carried his head high. His stature was well above the usual stature of men. In all companies he was conspicuous for beauty and for his bearing. And from the confusion and forgetfulness of that crowded period he still emerges, a living force, a brilliant memory; an American, as Dean Stanley said of him, "in whom the aspirations of America and the ancient culture of Europe were united."

There is supposed to be still a mystery about his recall by President Grant. But it is an open-air {205} mystery. Grant struck at Sumner through Motley. Any weapon was thought good enough to beat Sumner with. Motley was his friend, Sumner had made him Minister. It was deemed possible to humiliate Sumner and to teach him a lesson. The interests of the country were not allowed to stand in the way of this high purpose, and so Motley went. Or rather, he did not go. Asked to resign in July, 1870, he disregarded that request. Grant hesitated; or perhaps Mr. Fish, then Secretary of State, hesitated. But in November of the same year, Motley was recalled; an act without precedent and happily never repeated. No charges were made. There were none to make. Motley's diplomatic record, his personal character, were spotless. The childish scandal started at Vienna never had a rag of evidence to support it; nor anything behind it but anonymous personal animosity. His departure from England left no stain upon anybody except upon President Grant, and upon such officers and Ministers of his as stooped to be the instruments of his ill-will.

III

TWO MINISTERS AND TWO AMBASSADORS

Mr. Lowell may be compared with Mr. Motley as an example of our American method of appointing Ministers who not only are not--for they could not be--trained diplomats, but whose character is essentially undiplomatic. Mr. Motley was, however, so much more a man of the world {206} than Mr. Lowell that they cannot be bracketed. There is a similarity but no identity. Until Lowell came to London he was a recluse. Motley had never been that. Lowell had been a professor in Harvard University. Motley, though a student and historian, was not what the English call "Donnish," whereas Lowell had often the air of lecturing the company, as if a company of pupils. Delightful as his talk was, the touch of the pedagogue was there. Indeed, it may be doubted whether life in a university, which is a world by itself, is ever a good training for diplomacy. An Ambassador ought to be a man of the world--it is perhaps the first and highest of his qualifications--but not a man of a world. A thorough knowledge of the Greek aorist or of the proceedings of Antigonus in Asia Minor is not needed in the conduct of delicate negotiations; nor did Lowell find his familiarity with Spanish literature of much use at the Foreign Office, or in that larger foreign office known as English Society.

Society was to Lowell in the beginning of his English experiences a stumbling-block; and to the end he only too often made a misstep. He was liked all the same. The English are a people who can make allowances, nor do they expect a non-Englishman to be cast in an English mould. They recognized his positive merits. They did not dwell on what they thought defects. I suppose I have before now told what I always thought a characteristic saying of an English host, as Lowell drove away from his door:

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"I need not tell you how much I like Lowell and how delighted I am to have him here as often as he will come. But from the moment he enters my house till he is gone I am in a panic."

The panic into which this genial host fell was due to Lowell's fighting spirit; surely not the spirit of a diplomatist. To that and to a passion for accuracy which he allowed to become pedantic and aggressive. He left behind him a path strewn with victims; a renown for brilliancy; a just repute for many amiable and delightful traits. But the qualities essential to a Minister were not among them.

Mr. E. J. Phelps, who came after him, was a lawyer, and a lawyer may perhaps be expected to be more combative than a professor; but it was not so. Mr. Phelps took Mr. Lowell's house in Lowndes Square; a respectable dwelling in a very good square, but by no means an ideal legation. When Mr. Phelps became its tenant the atmosphere changed; the climate was a softer climate. The amelioration was due, in part, to Mrs. Phelps, who was beloved. Mrs. Lowell had been an invalid. Her husband used to say: "My wife has no acquaintance and I have no invention"--as an excuse for social shortcomings. But Mrs. Phelps knew a great many people and charmed those whom she knew.

It is doubtful whether an abler man than Mr. Phelps ever came from the United States to London as Minister. He was hailed at once as a brother by his brethren of the Bar; and they put {208} him on a level with their best. His simplicity of character, his humour, his truthfulness, were evident to everybody. Intellectually he was anybody's equal. As Minister he had, like all his predecessors, his trade to learn. But he soon learned what was essential; learned diplomacy as if it were a new cause he had to master for a great trial. His mind was judicial. He ought to have been Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

With the promise of a nomination to that great post in his pocket, he went home; but he returned. The will of Mr. Pat Collins, of Boston--hating Phelps because he would not, as Minister, be the instrument of Irish ill-will to England--had proved stronger than the will or the word of the President. Mr. Cleveland's surrender, no doubt under strong political pressure, deprived us of Mr. Phelps's services as Chief Justice and he became a law lecturer at Yale. He was a jurist who would have adorned either place. He was also an orator who leaped into fame by a single speech, at the farewell dinner given him in London; although, indeed, his speech at a dinner of welcome on his arrival was scarcely less felicitous. "A masterpiece of oratory dignified, eloquent, and pathetic," said Lord Rosebery, a judge of oratory if there be one.

We have sent to England so many different kinds of Ministers and Ambassadors that they must be praised--and, happily, most of them can be praised--with discrimination, and also with brevity, for I cannot go on for ever writing on a {209} single topic. I pass to Mr. Hay. The mansion Mr. Hay leased in Carlton House Terrace was, like all those on the south side of that short street looking on St. James's Park, adequate and even imposing. It was like unto the larger one on the corner, formerly Lord Ardilaun's, now Lord Ridley's. When Mr. Blaine entered it one evening at a concert he said to the friend who was with him: "This is the first really palatial house to which you have brought me." Not a palace, but palatial.

Mr. Hay knew as well as any American then living, or better, what a part social influences could be made to play in diplomatic life. He played that part with distinction. He was born for it. He had cultivated his natural gifts in half a dozen European capitals. He had such a knowledge of England and the English people that it has always seemed a pity he did not write a book about them. But he left a record as Ambassador which tells the story. He was a man who carried his point without a collision. He loved England and was beloved. When President McKinley sent for him to come home and be Secretary of State Hay said: "I am a soldier and must obey orders. But all my fun in life is over."

As it turned out it was not over. A still greater career opened before him, and he was the first American Secretary of State to make an imaginative use of his opportunities, and a great name in Europe and Asia alike. He was the first American Secretary of State to take the lead in a {210} world-embracing policy; to unite the European Powers in support of it; to extract a binding pledge even from Russia; to bring Japan, not very willingly, into this charmed circle; and to lay the foundations of American influence in China broad and deep. We often talk of America as a world-power. We have a right to, and whatever be the more recent, and perhaps in some cases rather doubtful, extensions of our authority, we owe what is best and most lasting in our position abroad to Hay.

None of all this could Hay foresee when he quitted London for Washington. What he knew was that he was relinquishing a place for which he had proved his fitness, and embarking upon the unknown. This sorrow at leaving England was genuine, and the sorrow of his English friends, and--if ever there be such a thing as a general sorrow--of the English public, was not less.

The late Queen said of Hay: "He is the most interesting of all the Ambassadors I have known." If the authority for this is wanted, it was said by the Queen to Lord Pauncefote, then British Ambassador to the United States; and Lord Pauncefote repeated it to me, with leave to repeat it to others, as I now do; by no means for the first time.

To Mr. Hay succeeded Mr. Choate. I hope it will be taken as a compliment if I say Mr. Choate was better liked the longer he stayed. He had, when he arrived, a frankness of speech which is sometimes called American; and is, no doubt, characteristic of certain individual Americans. {211} There is in Mr. Henry James's _Bostonians_ an American banker settled in England to whom his son, provoked by a remark of the father to a noble lord who was his guest, observes:

"Well, father, you have lived here a long time, and you have learned some of the things they say, but you haven't learnt the things they don't say."

It is inevitable. In new social circumstances, time is of the essence. It is no reproach to Mr. Choate that he found it so. He had, and has, an exuberant wit; one somewhat contemptuous of conventions and established forms. He poured it out in floods. He gave free scope to its caprices. When it had become chastened by experience, the English delighted in it; as we Americans have long delighted in it. But time was needed on both sides. The English and Mr. Choate had to become accustomed to each other. In the end they did. A beautiful harmony grew up, and before Mr. Choate went home he was an accepted figure in the society which at first had sometimes a questioning spirit. He, too, lived as an Ambassador ought to live; and in Carlton House Terrace, like Mr. Hay. From the beginning the Foreign Office had found in him, in Bismarck's phrase, a man with whom it was possible to do business. For he had a kind of preternatural rapidity in mastering great affairs, and a marked skill in the composition of public addresses.

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