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Diplomacy and the

of the diplomacy of our own country in the early part of the nineteenth century. Stratford Canning, Minister Plenipotentiary at Constantinople, received from the Foreign Minister and the Under-Secretary between 1810 and 1812 sixteen dispatches, and not one of them had any direct and immediate bearing on the troublesome and momentous negotiations which he was conducting at the Porte at the time.^[1]

The telegraph^[2] has very greatly increased the importance of the Foreign Office of the several States alike in the initiation, in the development and in the control of diplomacy. It has lessened both the difficulties and the independent value of the

delicate task I have to perform, particularly (speaking still most confidentially) as I am without a single instruction from home', i. (2nd ed., 1845) 209. Cf. dispatch from Harris at Petersburg to Viscount Weymouth, Secretary of State (northern department), September 9–20, 1779: 'If on reading the following lines it should appear that I have not entirely met the ideas of His Majesty and of his confidential servants; that I have given too great a latitude to my full powers, and not entirely fulfilled the principal object of my mission; I must entreat your Lordship to believe that I should not have ventured to have taken, on so important a subject, so much on myself, if it had not seemed to me that the exigencies of the times required unusual efforts,' i. (2nd ed.) 211.

↑ The Earl of Malmesbury, in his Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, writing, February 23, 1852, of Sir Stratford Canning—later, Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe—with reference to Lord Derby sounding him in 1851 about taking the Foreign Office, said: 'His talents are beyond dispute, but his temper is so despotic and irritable, that he can only display them in a peculiar kind of diplomacy. He managed the Turks in their own way, and it was Sultan versus Sultan.' He was Ambassador at Constantinople from 1825 to 1828 and again from 1841 to 1858, including one period of absence of two years, and one of seven months.
↑ 'This age of rapid communication, of what I would call the telegraphic demoralisation of those who formerly had to act for themselves and are now content to be at the end of the wire.'—Sir Horace Rumbold (sometime H.M. Ambassador at Vienna), Recollections of a Diplomatist, 2 vols. (1902), i, 111–112. See also ii. 242.

[2] The Earl of Malmesbury, in his Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, writing, February 23, 1852, of Sir Stratford Canning—later, Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe—with reference to Lord Derby sounding him in 1851 about taking the Foreign Office, said: 'His talents are beyond dispute, but his temper is so despotic and irritable, that he can only display them in a peculiar kind of diplomacy. He managed the Turks in their own way, and it was Sultan versus Sultan.' He was Ambassador at Constantinople from 1825 to 1828 and again from 1841 to 1858, including one period of absence of two years, and one of seven months.

[3] 'This age of rapid communication, of what I would call the telegraphic demoralisation of those who formerly had to act for themselves and are now content to be at the end of the wire.'—Sir Horace Rumbold (sometime H.M. Ambassador at Vienna), Recollections of a Diplomatist, 2 vols. (1902), i, 111–112. See also ii. 242.

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