It is to private letters and confidential communications and to verbal ones that we must look for information of the real influences at work. 'The Emperor of Russia, for instance, is on the whole very friendly to us—from tradition, for family reasons, and so on—and also the Grand Duchesse Hélène, who influences him and watches him on our behalf. The Empress, on the other hand, is not our friend. But that is only to be ascertained through confidential channels and not officially.'[1]
The chief danger to be averted in the conduct of foreign policy is, as has already been said, that of allowing diplomacy to outrun preparations and the strength on which success in diplomacy must ultimately depend. If we turn our view inward upon the nation itself, we shall translate that formula without violence into the expression, that a nation must not acquire a reputation for inconstancy and caprice. In this part of our subject we might have been not unhappily. spacious where we shall now be severely concise. We might cite well-known examples of the inconsistencies, arbitrariness, and excesses of the Athenian democracy in the realm of foreign affairs, and one might point in contrast to the impressive eulogy passed by Mommsen on the Roman Senate[2] in the
- ↑ Busch, i. 559–60, under February 22, 1871. Bismarck, speaking of his Frankfort experiences, said of Count Rechberg—Austrian Minister and President of the Diet at Frankfort—that he was at least honourable from a personal standpoint, although, as an Austrian diplomat of that time, he was not able to pay too strict a regard to truth. Rechberg once received a dispatch in which he was instructed to maintain cordial relations with Prussia, and a second dispatch, sent to him at the same time, in which an exactly opposite course was enjoined. Bismarck, calling on him, was inadvertently handed the second dispatch to read; begging Rechberg's pardon for having been given the wrong one, he consoled him with an assurance that he would take no advantage of the mistake, but would use it merely for his personal information. Ibid. i. 373.
- ↑ 'Called to power, not by the empty accident of birth, but substantially:
