secret aims. I think the British world perfectly understands and would thoroughly describe the broad ends for which British diplomacy works. Questions are perpetually arising, sometimes large, sometimes small, ranging perhaps on the one side from some great boundary question between two great Empires to the gas lighting of Bangkok on the other. All these questions have to be dealt with by some Department. The objects which the Government have in view in dealing with them are quite simple, quite plain, and are known to all the world. What is not simple, what is not plain, what is not easy, is the actual day-to-day carrying out of the negotiations by which the end is to be attained. A Foreign Office and a Diplomatic Service are great instruments for preventing, as far as can be prevented, and diminishing, even when you cannot prevent, friction between States which are, or which ought to be, friendly: How is the task of peace-maker—because that is largely the task which falls to diplomatists and to the Foreign Office, which controls diplomatists—to be pursued if you are to shout your grievances from the housetop whenever they occur? The only result is that you embitter public feeling, that the differences between the two States suddenly attain a magnitude they ought never to be allowed to approach, that the newspapers of the two countries agitate themselves, that the Parliaments of the two countries have their passions set on fire, and great crises arise, which may end, have ended sometimes, in international catastrophes. … You have to consider, when you are perfecting your Parliamentary machinery, which, in the main, is your machinery of criticism, whether you are not weakening your machinery for action. This House is not an executive body, cannot be an executive body, and if it tried to be an executive body would do its work altogether abominably, The 670 Gentlemen could not do it, and no delegation to Commits Rooms of forty or fifty could do it, That is not the way the work of the world is done anywhere if it is done effectively. No house of business manages its affairs in that way; no Army and no Navy manages its affairs in that way. Those who aspire to that ideal of popular machinery and call it democratic confuse administration with criticism and legislation. Administration
