Priam, to fight for her), upon what she has been, and is, and stands for, and has to stand against. ‘Remember in all that you do that you are in an enemy country’, a recent German Ambassador is said to have remarked in words of advice to a junior who was proceeding to London: it would not be necessary to add, ‘But so conduct yourself as though you are a friend’. Assuredly we may all agree that no representative of his country abroad should drink of the potion described in poetic fiction that made men forget their country; and, so, it is a wise recommendation that members of the diplomatic service should fortify themselves against such insinuating influence by periodic visits to the land they represent.[1]
- ↑ See the very instructive and valuable Report from the Select Committee on Diplomatic Service (with Proceedings, Minutes of Evidence), 1861: 197 (Sir G. H. Seymour: ‘A man should not be left in a foreign country long enough to become a German or a Spaniard, but . . . should fortify himself every now and then by coming to England’); 458 (Sir T. Wyse, writing from Athens to Lord John Russell: ‘British ministers abroad should be encouraged from time to time to return to their own country with the view of keeping up to the level of political knowledge of which England is the centre, and bracing themselves anew, in the atmosphere of our free institutions and existence, to that English spirit and bearing which is the best guarantee for legitimate success with other nations, and which I trust will always be the distinction of English diplomacy in every part of the world.’ Similarly, Grant Duff, who was a member of the Committee which reported in 1861, writing on ‘Foreign Policy’ in Practical Politics (1881), 85–6: ‘Diplomatists should not be quite so much “up in a balloon” as they often are . . . it is a real misfortune that they are not oftener enabled . . . to come into contact with our home political life. They greatly need se retremper from time to time in its boisterous but health-bestowing currents; there should be, if possible, more frequent exchanges from parliamentary to diplomatic, and from diplomatic to parliamentary activity. That a man should be at once a member of the House of Commons and a representative of his Sovereign abroad, as was the case,
it will also put your adversaries—who will still hunt counter—to a loss in all their disquisitions and undertakings.’
