Our Diplomatic Service

...It would be as impossible for the French hierarchy to advise a universal Catholic rapprochement of their flocks with the Rhinelanders, even, as it might be for the American bishops to recommend the League of Nations...

...Before the war an earnest industrialist, M. Vanderpol, had founded in that most earnest of French towns, Lyons Xwhich saw the birth of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith) a Societe Gratry or Ligue des Catholiques pour la Paix, which was revived in Paris in 1921, under the name of Ligue des Catholiques Franc.ais pour la Justice Internationale...

...the more or less permanent professional staff blushed on general principles for its amateur chief...

...Very strained were the relations between the careerdiplomats and the consular service men of the same origins, whose duty lay in the promotion of trade relations rather than in acquiring for our government what benefit might be derived from court relations...

...it seemed perhaps better that men should be raw and awkward than that they should be well skilled in the arts of European diplomacy but out of tune with America...

...Fortunately in most cases, the wealth of our representatives was not inherited, but accumulated by personal effort...

...In the course of time it became plain that to change the entire staff with every ambassador or minister was wasteful and hampering...

...The American diplomatic service is a closed book to most of us, but one expects of editors some part of that omniscience (if only a very small part) which they affect with such solemn assurance...

...Nevertheless, long residence abroad loosens home contacts, and even the fortunate September 30, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 499 few who revolve between the choice foreign capitals and the State Department, cannot wholly escape the deadening tendency to the bureaucratic trend of mind, characteristic of the water-tight compartments of that great office...

...Our slender means and our theoretical republican simplicity, clashed with this custom, and insensibly those Americans were drawn into the growing service who were able to meet this condition out of private means...

...This condition still prevails...

...These may seem humble beginnings and, in spite of the brilliance of the men who are responsible for them, they have not even a commencement of popularity...

...There is much truth in all this, as there generally is much truth in the shrewd judgments formed around the post-office stove...

...We accepted, also, conformity to the rules laid down by the courts to which our men were accredited, and we were obliged to do so, unless we wished to isolate our men and render them utterly useless...

...German pilgrimages to Lourdes, or Paray-le-Monial, seemed entirely natural...

...OUR DIPLOMATIC SERVICE By WILLIAM FRANKLIN SANDS ONE of the great morning papers not long ago announced that the appointment of new ministers to certain Central American countries "from the lower ranks . . . signifies much...

...But readers of history know how easy it is for a slogan, bred of mere speculative study, to make its way through the masses the moment outward circumstances become favorable...

...It was part of European court diplomacy to live on a great scale, to show by gorgeous display the wealth and power of the ambassador's royal master...

...It is all quite apart from our daily lives—even more than the navy and the army, which we can see...

...he was thoroughly at home in statecraft...

...A diplomatic agent, such as Franklin, was the equal of the President who sent him, and of the Secretary of State with whom he cooperated and whom he advised...

...So it was comparatively easy for M. Marc Sangnier to revisit Germany as shortly after the war as 1922, and the year after, to defend in the Chamber a policy of rapprochement...

...But several permanent organizations besides Pax and Prince Ghika's association, imply a resolute intellectual effort in the direction of peace...

...The members of the Ligue des Catholiques Frangais are therefore not pacifists of the ordinary description...

...As our relations extended to other countries than those immediately concerned in the settlement of our country and in the Revolution, it became necessary to send out resident agents of the government...

...When the United States began to treat with European nations, we chose men of ideal diplomatic training...

...We have, in general, an impression that the service is a rich man's service, and that those who are in it who are not men of wealth are there for political services, or, because, if young, they are not quite fit for the great game of business...

...and in his day men of his kind were more familiar with world conditions than in our day of cable and radio, because they understood world conditions and could assign such news as came to them to its proper relation to facts— a function apparently beyond the capacity of modern editors...

...he was more broadly educated than is usual among Americans of today and of wider culture...

...It is lamentably true that long service in diplomacy is completely unfitting for a business life, though the American diplomat is incomplete without a basic knowledge of business and contact with the mentality of American business men...

...while in a professional service the average is generally mediocre...

...It is, however, not a new move, nor a new idea, nor is it true that it originated with PresidentRoosevelt...

...He saw the difficulties of the man trained wholly in America and the dangers of appointing to responsible rank a man who had spent his whole life abroad...

...he had taken creative part in the building of our government and our nation...

...The principal offices are still open to "untrained" men—and should be...

...He had lived our business life...

...Under our system, prevailing until recent years, young men were appointed to specific posts not interchangeable...

...A glance at P. de la Briere's recent volume on L'Organisation Internationale du Monde et la Papaute (Paris: Spes...

...These may be regarded as isolated and incidental manifestations...

...that "Bryan's looting of the service for the benefit of deserving Democrats interrupted a process of promotion begun by Roosevelt, and considerably injured our standing in the South American countries . . . etc...

...he was a man of science...

...Grover Cleveland and Richard Olney initiated a carefully considered plan which was wiped out under the McKinley administration and reconstituted only in part by Roosevelt...

...Such men are rarely available today, except in emergencies, but we still have them and the doors of diplomacy should never be closed to them by any wellintentioned over-crystallization of the foreign service...

...Its two most active members, Monsignor Beaupin and Father R. P. de la Briere, S.J., are now in Geneva where their presence at the meetings of the League of Nations is officially recognized...

...James G. Blaine, a man of vigorous mind, had well defined opinions on the subject...

...As a matter of fact, we have not had in our foreign service a man more fully and completely trained in the fundamentals of diplomacy than Franklin...

...In so doing we accepted necessarily the rules of diplomatic precedence and procedure laid down for the proper administration of international law, by the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon and the reconstruction of Europe by the allied emperors and kings...

...Living in foreign countries, with rare visits to the United States, soaked in the atmosphere of courts, many of our younger diplomats grew apart from American life, were often more than a little ashamed of its "plebeian" character...

...shows how much has already been accomplished by mere insistence on a principle which, it is true, ought to appear with dazzling clarity...

...So, more and more, the secretaries of embassy and legation were left at their posts...

...Benjamin Franklin is often referred to as a bright example of the homely, untrained American, more than holding his own with the bejeweled, shrewd, unscrupulous, highly cultured diplomats of the old world...

...Cleveland's idea is now partly embodied in the Rogers Act...

...The very title of a small magazine they publish, Justice et Paix, shows that their point of view is different from that of the Due de Broglie, and more nearly related to that frequently expressed by Cardinal Mercier—"Justice first"—but their intellectualism is international and Catholic...

...On the whole America has never suffered in her representation, for the average has been high...

...the new chief must always have somebody familiar with current events and local usage...

...Even the administrative genius of Elihu Root, fresh from the reorganization of the War Department, failed to affect the self-sufficiency of the Department of State, and wisely gave up the attempt...

...He believed (and he was right) that diplomats would profit greatly by training first in the con...

...In every capital there were many little local usages, important only inasmuch as they facilitated business, to which new agents were necessarily strange...

...so that the very qualities which had made them successful at home made them also eminently successful in their foreign activities...

...Be it noted that in this reconstruction, the allies punished Napoleon, not France, though French troops had wasted Europe...

...that the President thereby showed "his desire to make our diplomatic service a career...

...In fact, their effort is not so much to bring about individual contact between French and German Catholics, as to promote a constant collaboration between the League and the Church, which means Catholic internationalism in itself...

...Soon the same politicians will meet a number of Germans at a convention in Luxembourg, while the well-known Caritas Verband, in Freiburg-im-Brisgau, is sending invitations to many Frenchmen to attend a similar meeting in October...

...In the natural course of things, career-diplomats become insensibly detached from the realities of the national lives they represent...

...There were still drawbacks, however, to this arrangement...

...This league is closely connected and practically affiliated with the Institut de Droit International at Louvain, and with the Union Catholique d'Etudes Internationales, founded at Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1917, while the war was at its tensest...

...This anomaly is at last rectified by the Rogers Act, The diplomatic secretaries and the consular service are merged into one Foreign Service, as they should have been (in the opinion of some older diplomats) twenty years ago...

...It is still a rich man's service in the command ranks, though the Rogers Act has made it possible to live more comfortably in the lower ranks, and affords security if one does not aspire to the top...

...The need for a highly trained secretariat has been evident to most of our Secretaries of State since earliest times...

...Let the multitudinous little business agreements between French and German industrialists solidify into the combination which everybody foresees—and in a few months, perhaps in a few weeks, the atmosphere will clear...

...He was superior to most European career-diplomats, and we had men of his type in all our important posts...

...Of late, interchange has been possible without the traditional red tape...

...The problem has been to give the necessary training without so crystallizing the service as to remove it completely from the American life it is supposed to represent...