Our State Department

...The contradiction involved permeates also what policy lingers in the State Department...

...An exhibition of the kind recently reported in connection with an inquiry by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, simply could not happen to the sort of crown commission that has examined the British diplomatic service in the process of breaking it of just such bad habits as we have copied from their young detrimentals...

...No one of consequence on the inside cares to come forward, lest he jeopardize his advancement, and no one on the outside who has once been in is willing to bell the cat lest he give the impression that while in, he was not one of the elect...

...and at this time was studying Panama and the canal...

...In the jungle, men quickly revert to semi-savage or wholly savage life...

...Instead of that, we have permitted our diplomatic service to imitate a fashion instituted in the British service by a small group of men who have, fortunately for England, been eliminated...

...A dignified, rather austere but very gentle person, speaking Spanish like Lord Dunsany's hidalgos, he was a figure to catch the eye of men of Spanish blood and to inspire confidence...

...had gone to Alaska during the gold rush...

...to me they are just like the mosquitoes and the buzzards—I want to get rid of them...

...The two points of view illustrated by this anecdote are constantly at work—mutually exclusive, mutually destructive, in all our administrative relations with the Spanish-speaking peo658 pies of America and Asia...

...The moment the State Department comes under fire, for any reason, people who are unfriendly to it press to the fore...

...Lane had made his first long voyage as a young officer of the Flying Cloud and had been mate of one of the famous clipper ships at a very early age...

...that these governed themselves by an adaptation of the New England town-meeting...

...and the remedy is not far to seek...

...OUR STATE DEPARTMENT By WILLIAM FRANKLIN SANDS SOME years ago, when the government of the Panama Canal Zone was in the process of formation, a bureau of municipalities was set up mainly to relieve the governor and the executive secretary of the care of native Panamanians living in the zone...

...It was never essentially even an English system, but something rather decadent which was blown out of the English system by good common sense, even before the war and the Labour party brought about a new point of view in Britain's civil service...

...Yet the facts of the matter and their reasons for being are all ascertainable, and that quite simply...

...Crown commissions do not take kindly to being spoken to by self-important young men as though commissioners were five years old and mentally defective...

...Lane was discovered as chief of a bureau, and brought before them...

...There were those who thought the work of Mr...

...On cross-examination it appeared that he had built up a certain number of municipalities...

...It was a modest bureau and was contained quite comfortably under the hat of Rufus A. Lane, of Hingham...

...The construction of the canal was vastly important certainly, as a great physical work competently done...

...He had joined the establishment of one of the great merchant princes of the China coast (when American China trade was an impressive thing, and carried on with an air) ; had lived long in the Philippines in Spanish days, as a friend of Spanish governors...

...About a year after the bureau had been created, one of the periodical investigating committees of Congress came by...

...One of the members of the investigating committee remarked later: "I don't see why he takes so much trouble with these people...

...Rather ill-natured things are said, and when personal relief has come with the saying of them, nothing more happens...

...but the little by-product of the jungle municipalities (abolished by the congressional committee) did seem to a number of people to be quite comparable with it in importance...

...that, far from being a charge on the zone government, they had over one hundred thousand silver dollars in the bank...

...had been in California during the oil rush...

...His effort was to put no constraint on them, but to teach them to supply their own needs, to bring them to prefer the essentials of self-government, however primitive, rather than the prevailing extremes of anarchy or despotism...

...our methods should be irreproachable...

...that they had been connected by roads through the jungle (cut through and maintained by themselves...

...that they were putting through very successfully certain measures of necessary public hygiene...

...It is a pity that we have nothing, and can set up nothing, like a crown commission...

...American diplomacy might be conceived as something different from diplomacy as it is understood in Europe...

...If the first-clasS men in the service who do not like this condition prefer to hold on and condone for the sake of a somewhat nebulous career, and those outside fear to be classed as "disappointed men" and therefore not quite reliable witnesses, not much is to be expected...

...They were very thorough and very keen to examine every phase of the canal work...

...The reason for its growth with us is simple enough, though it is doubtful that that reason will emerge from present newspaper debate on the subject...

...Lane's bureau of municipalities one of the most impressive illustrations that could be offered to Panama and other neighbors of what could be done for their more primitive inhabitants in the remote interior...

...He took his office seriously, and proceeded to construct municipalities out of palm-leaf huts hidden in the jungle away from the line of the railroad, and to collect runaway Jamaicans, imported to dig the canal, into orderly communities...

...That is not the way remedy will be brought to what really does exist and really is an evil, prejudicial to many a good man in the service, and harmful to the proper conduct of the business of the United States...

...and to the contradiction is added another factor hampering to the development of a clear-cut, constructive policy based on mutual advantage and cooperation: that is the pernicious system of autocratic favoritism which exists, in spite of all disguises and denials, and which has become a feature of our foreign service...

...Our objective might be easily defined, and rather simple...

...There is an illustration of two current American points of view, applicable anywhere from Mexico and Central America to the Philippines...

...an alien system, incompatible with American needs and American ways, has been made traditional with us...

...Such a commission is not awed nor intimidated by mere language nor by an assumption of mystery...