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Diplomacy and the

be about to proceed, they were to be examined in ‘so much of McCulloch’s Geographical Dictionary as relates to that country’. But, at least, it was a background to the international system and the public international law of the candidates’ own day.^[1] For that it would not be quite useless.

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The indispensable qualities for a diplomatist, according to French official statements^[2] of the eighteenth century, are prudence, address, and dexterity; alertness, circumspection, sagacity.^[3] Our own favourite words for the qualities desirable are ‘discretion’^[4] and ‘tact’: above everything else, tact—the gift of touching and handling with nice discernment and

↑ Candidates for promotion to paid attachéships were required to ‘draw up a report on the general commercial and political relations of the several countries in which they may have resided; on the internal polity, and the administration and social institutions of such countries, and on the character of their people’, without reference to ‘current political affairs’. Further, candidates were required to show that they possessed ‘such a knowledge of international law as can be acquired from Wheaton’s Elements of International Law and Wheaton’s History of International Law’: no mean requirement, and no mean accession of strength to the candidates’ ‘History’.
↑ e.g. in the ‘instruction’ to d’Hautefort, ambassador to Vienna, 1750: ‘Plus elle [cette commission] est importante et délicate, plus elle exige dans le ministre qui doit la remplir, une naissance distinguée, de la dignité dans la représentation, de la sagesse accompagnée de fermeté dans les discours, enfin beaucoup d’activité et de circonspection dans la conduite.’—Recueil des Instructions données aux Ambassadeurs et Ministres de France depuis les Traités de Westphalie jusqu’à la Révolution Française: Autriche, 312.
↑ Prudence, ‘that stale daughter of Hugo Grotius’, hangs fetters upon the end of the goose-quill (Sir Robert Keith, Memoirs and Correspondence (1849), i. 444); but it is ‘in all things a virtue, in politics the first of virtue’ (Burke, Correspondence (1844), iii. 118).
↑ This has at times assumed the form of ‘a sort of dignified torpor, which seems to imply—“My slumbers are deep politics, my lead is worth other people’s gold.”‘ Keith, ii. 401, who had in mind some Austrian ministers.

[1] Candidates for promotion to paid attachéships were required to ‘draw up a report on the general commercial and political relations of the several countries in which they may have resided; on the internal polity, and the administration and social institutions of such countries, and on the character of their people’, without reference to ‘current political affairs’. Further, candidates were required to show that they possessed ‘such a knowledge of international law as can be acquired from Wheaton’s Elements of International Law and Wheaton’s History of International Law’: no mean requirement, and no mean accession of strength to the candidates’ ‘History’.

[2] .g. in the ‘instruction’ to d’Hautefort, ambassador to Vienna, 1750: ‘Plus elle [cette commission] est importante et délicate, plus elle exige dans le ministre qui doit la remplir, une naissance distinguée, de la dignité dans la représentation, de la sagesse accompagnée de fermeté dans les discours, enfin beaucoup d’activité et de circonspection dans la conduite.’—Recueil des Instructions données aux Ambassadeurs et Ministres de France depuis les Traités de Westphalie jusqu’à la Révolution Française: Autriche, 312.

[3] Prudence, ‘that stale daughter of Hugo Grotius’, hangs fetters upon the end of the goose-quill (Sir Robert Keith, Memoirs and Correspondence (1849), i. 444); but it is ‘in all things a virtue, in politics the first of virtue’ (Burke, Correspondence (1844), iii. 118).

[4] This has at times assumed the form of ‘a sort of dignified torpor, which seems to imply—“My slumbers are deep politics, my lead is worth other people’s gold.”‘ Keith, ii. 401, who had in mind some Austrian ministers.

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