DIPLOMACY AND THE CONDUCT OF FOREIGN POLICY
I
Mr. Freeman, who had the keen interest of a politician and partisan in questions of foreign policy in his own day, as well as the profound knowledge of the historian, once described an experience he had as a magistrate in petty sessions.[1] He had to examine two witnesses, each of whom was required to give an account of a certain conversation. One of them presented his view of what passed in the words, ‘They all began to talk politics, putting questions to me that I could not answer’. The other witness, describing the same conversation, said, ‘They began to talk about the rise of the world, and Adam and Eve’. Mr. Freeman remarked that the definition of politics implied in the second of these statements had often come before his mind since the words were spoken. He thought that the man who looked upon a discussion about ‘the rise of the world, and Adam and Eve’ as coming under the head ‘politics’ showed an acute sense of what politics really are. ‘A conversation about the rise of the world would be very apt to pass into theological discussion, and theological discussion is very apt to pass into more strictly political discussion. . . . Every political question is a question of our duty as a nation; it is, therefore, a moral question.’ Mr. Freeman thought he took this view of politics himself during the two years of storm and stress in the history of the Eastern
- ↑ Thompson, Public Opinion and Lord Beaconsfield (1886), ii. 39-40, quoting from Mr. Freeman's letter, ‘No Politics’, in the Daily News, September 28, 1876.
