Page:Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (1919).djvu/33

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Conduct of Foreign Policy
11

schoolmaster would have the support of Sovereigns and Ambassadors.

The ‘Foreign Office hand’ in England was a legacy of Canning and Palmerston. Canning laid down the rule that not more than ten lines should be put into one page of foolscap. Palmerston advised Lord Malmesbury, when he assumed the charge of the Foreign Office, to insist on all official correspondence being written in a plain hand and with proper intervals between the lines; and he named some Ministers ‘whose writing was quite illegible’.[1]

Neither French nor any other language now holds the place of privilege from which French had supplanted Latin before the middle of the eighteenth century as the usual, though not universal, language of treaties and of diplomatic instruments for European States.[2] But a ready command of French, to be spoken with that ‘easy elegance’ which a polite ambassador ascribed to the speech of our Queen Elizabeth in Latin,[3] has

  1. Memoirs, as above: ‘On a very badly written despatch he [Palmerston] wrote: “Tell Mr. W., in a ‘Separate’, that the person who copies out his despatches should form his letters by connecting his slanting down strokes by visible lines at top or bottom according to the letters which he intends his parallel lines to represent.—P. 18/4/51.” On another badly written despatch from one of H. M.’s consuls he wrote: “A Despatch must contain much valuable matter to reward one for deciphering such handwriting as this—which can only be compared to Iron Railings leaning out of the perpendicular.—P. 23/12/57.” Of another despatch he wrote: “Reading Mr. R.’s handwriting is like running Penknives into one’s Eyes. P. 21/4/64.”—Sir Edward Hertslet, Recollections of the Old Foreign Office (1901), 78–9.
  2. See Satow, Diplomatic Practice (2 vols. 1917), i. 58–61, and Martens, Guide diplomatique, i. 251–4, ed. 1838; ii. 6–9, ed. 1851.
  3. Of Elizabeth’s speech to an Ambassador from Sigismund III, King of Poland, in 1597, Robert Cecil wrote to the Earl of Essex: ‘I sweare by the living God, that her Matie made one of the best aunswers ex tempore, in Latin, that ever I heard, being much mooved to be so challenged in publick. The wordes of her beginning were these: “Expectavi Legationem, mihi