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BRITISH AND AMERICAN AMBASSADORS.

Of all diplomatic posts I have often thought the pleasantest in most ways and the most exacting in some is that of American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Whoever holds it gets infinitely nearer to the realities of English life than the representative of any other country. He is treated from the first as a national guest whom it is a delight to honor, rather than as an official emissary. The Mayor and Corporation of Plymouth or Southampton board his vessel in the bay, and, even before he lands, convince him that the British people have no intention of surrendering him to the Court, Whitehall, and the West End. Nothing, indeed, could well be more significant or of better omen than the semi-official, semipopular greetings that are extended to each new American Ambassador on his arrival. They are local in form but national in the feeling behind them. They have become, in fact, a' custom of British public life, and a custom of which the full meaning is to be found in its singularity. So far as I know, nothing like it exists anywhere else. No Ambassador to this or any other nation is similarly honored. For the representative of a foreign Power to be fêted on his recall in the capital of the State to which he is accredited is

common enough. But for the representative of a foreign Power to be hailed with welcoming words at the moment of his arrival, before he has even presented his credentials, before he has given any token either of his personality or of his diplomatic policy, this is an experience which, alone among the diplomats of the world, is enjoyed by the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. It is intended, I need hardly say, to be precisely what it is-a unique compliment, a distinguishing recognition on our

part that Great Britain and the United States stand to one another in a special relationship such as unites no other nations on this earth, and that between them some departure from the merely official attitude is of all things the most natural. It would be against the grain of national instinct if no distinction were to be made between the American and other Ambassadors. Popular opinion separates him at once from his colleagues of the diplomatic corps. He is the only one who reaches the mass of the people. The ordinary Londoner, who could no more tell you the name of the Italian or German Ambassador than a New Yorker could tell you the name of the Lieutenant-Governor of Kansas, would not only answer correctly if you asked him the name of the American Ambassador, but would probably rattle off Mr. Whitelaw Reid's predecessors as far back as James Russell Lowell. He is the only one in whom the people as a whole have any interest. From the day of his arrival he becomes an intimate part of English society, and a still more intimate part of the world of English art and letters and public-by which, of course, I do not mean political-life. Other Ambassadors may be as lavishly entertained, may be able to show as full an engagement list, may dispense in return an equally brilliant hospitality. But the quality of the welcome extended to them differs altogether from that which greets their American confrère. He alone gets behind the scenes, is shown the best of whatever England has to offer, and becomes at once a public character. Of him alone is it expected that he will be less of an official and more of a man. One hears, perhaps, once in a lifetime of the Russian or German Ambassador being

asked to lecture before an educational or philosophical society, or invited to a literary dinner. However great their command of English, they still stand outside all but a fraction of the national life. The public knows nothing about them, and does not care to know anything. They are what the American Ambassador never is-they are foreigners, and treated as such. A paragraph in the Court Circular is enough to announce their advent or recall, while their American colleague, on his arrival as well as his departure, receives a full-blown editorial salute from the entire London Press. The one is merely an incident of officialdom; the other is a national event.

This is, I think, essentially as it should be. But at the same time it is a state of affairs that raises some peculiar perplexities and embarrassments. English hospitality successfully, as a rule, escapes the charge of exuberance. We are, indeed, rather famous for taking our guests' enjoyment for granted, for leaving them cordially alone to amuse themselves in their own way, and for not persecuting them with fussy attentions. But with the American Ambassador we throw our traditions overboard. We become almost as anxious and demonstrative as the French, or as his own countrymen. Mr. W. D. Howells in a deathless adjective once dubbed and damned American hospitality as "inexorable." I am not sure that there is not something little short of inexorable in our treatment of American Ambassadors, and that we are not at times positively brutal in our kindness. We do not, of course, mean to be, but that does not alter the fact that we are. Indeed, it rather aggravates it. Our inhumanity is all the more pitiless for being unconscious, and the chances of reformation all the more remote because we are blandly unaware that reformation is needed. If we could conceive The Hague tribunal

adjudicating so nice a point of international manners, I am afraid the decision would be that, in the case of the American Ambassador, we commit the worst crime against hospitality by being too hospitable, that we ask too much of our guest, and drive him too hard, and that there is something perilously adamantine in the attentions we shower upon him. We never really give the poor man a moment's rest. Throughout his stay among us we presume inordinately on his acquaintance with English. There must, indeed, be times when we force him to wish he spoke Basque and Basque only, and did not the faith and morals hold that Milton held. So might he live among us and possess his soul in quietude-a diplomatist and not a public institution. But as it is, no sooner has he reached London than the bombardment begins. I must admit at once that it is most vigorously replied to. England and the American Ambassador set to forthwith to see which can entertain the other the best. Mr. Lowell used to complain that England spoiled the American Ambassador. I rather think that the American Ambassador is more apt to spoil us. Take, for instance, the case of Mr. Choate. Mr. Choate came to us in 1899, after a brilliant and indefatigable career at the American Bar and in American public life. He might well have thought himself entitled to a rest; we, on our part, ought to have seen that he got it. But there is no rest for an American Ambassador in London. He only begins to know what work is when he becomes an English public character, and he becomes that just as soon as his credentials are presented. It is true that not all the depredations upon his leisure are committed by Englishmen; his own countrymen and country women have something to answer for. They take possession of his house on every July the Fourth, and squeeze his hand to a pulp

without breaking down his smile; and they demand his presence and his speech at the yearly banquets on Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Washington's Birthday. Some fifteen or twenty times did Mr. Choate face these gatherings without once repeating himself. It was the penalty of his position, and no slight one; but it could scarcely stand a moment's comparison with all that was inflicted upon him by English insistence. Mr. Choate was the principal guest, and easily the principal speaker, at a dinner given by the Associated Chambers of Commerce within a fortnight of landing. In the six years that he spent among us he distributed the prizes at half a dozen schools, colleges, and institutions; he composed and delivered addresses on Franklin, on Lincoln, on the United States Supreme Court, on American Education, on Alexander Hamilton, and on Emerson; he proposed the health of the Royal Society; he spoke on their favorite authors to the Sir Walter Scott Club, the Dante Society, and the Boz Club; he presided over a lecture by Mr. Birrell; he unveiled portraits and memorial windows, and opened libraries; he spoke three or four times at the Guildhall banquet; he publicly interested himself in many philanthropies; and he was the speaker of the evening at dinners of remorseless frequency and racking variety. Altogether during the term of his Ambassadorship he must have addressed English or mainly English audiences nearly a hundred times. That, it must be owned, was asking a good deal. One would say it was really asking too much were it not that we never seemed to touch the limit either of Mr. Choate's versatility or of his good nature. He went everywhere and met everyone; he let himself freely to the infinitely varied demands of English hospitality; he became, in a word, an Ambassador to the people as well as to the Court. Not

that Mr. Choate had not his diplomatic successes; he helped to wipe out two most contentious issues that in other times and other hands might have led to something more than a passing disagreement. But the outstanding merit

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of his Ambassadorship was its supreme range of sociability. Mr. Choate got to know all classes and almost all corners of this country. He spent himself ungrudgingly in forwarding many public movements and in the task, which he ranked among the first of his official duties, of doing all he could to interpret America to England. Hence his lavish appearances as a lecturer on American institutions and American statesmen, with crisp, popular, comprehensive discourses. There was no occasion of the slightest AngloAmerican interest that could not enlist his patronage and voice, and the genial freshness, point and aptness of his speeches always made them the feature of the evening. I cannot recall a single instance where he failed to hold and delight his audience. had the oratorical presence and the oratorical attributes-a fine, massive, lawyer-like head set imposingly on a stalwart frame; a voice of astonishing clarity and carrying power; gestures that were eloquence in themselves; a wit as sly as Lord Rosebery's, and as scathing as was Lord Salisbury's; and a mind as compact, lucid, and orderly as anyone could wish to come across. He belonged to the colloquial school of oratory. He gave one the easy outpourings of a well-stocked mind and a large and genial nature, never flat or stale, but quick with the play of humorous fancy. He never spoke without saying something, and he never made the fatal mistake of soft-soaping England and English ways of doing things. As he travels "down-town" to his office in Wall Street, or surveys from its windows the sparkling movement of the Bay, or relaxes in the

leisure and security of his Massachusetts home, Mr. Choate need have no fear that the people to whom he so greatly endeared himself have ceased to remember him.

But if his way of meeting the demands of his office was uniquely his own, the demands themselves remain a fixed quantity, and seem to be as inevitable an appendage to the Ambassadorship as the rather dingy offices in Victoria Street. The life that Mr. Choate led was more or less the life that Mr. Bayard, Mr. Hay, and Mr. Lowell led before him, and that Mr. Whitelaw Reid has been living for the past four years with equal distinction and success. The blame for it must be shared between England and America. We calmly take it for granted that the representative of the United States, whoever he may be, will be a first-class after dinner speaker, familiar with the whole of American history and the whole of English literature, omniscient and omnipresent, and able and willing at any moment to read a paper, deliver an address and unveil a monument. We turn him into a sort of lecturer to the nation. We launch him on a full tide of oratory from Land's End to John o' Groat's, thrusting upon him, as he sweeps along, the presidency of innumerable societies. We scout the idea that protocols and despatches and all the banalities of international negotiations can have any claim upon him. Knowing him to be an American, and therefore interested in education, we play upon his weakness and shamelessly take toll of his democratic sympathies. Things indeed have come to such a pass that an American Ambassador who was content to be merely an Ambassador, who could not or would not speak, who loathed public occasions and shunned a platform, and who screened himself behind the ramparts of officialdom, would be reckoned not only a freak

of nature but a disappointment and a failure. It is partly, as I have hinted, America's own fault. She should not send us such charming, cultivated, good-natured men, every one of them triply armed with the capacity to discharge our exactions in full. Adams, Phelps, Lowell, Bayard, Hay, Choate, and Whitelaw Reid-what other Embassy in the world can show so brilliant a line of occupants? Every one of them was distinguished as a lawyer, citizen, or litterateur before he became eminent as a diplomatist. Every one of them had interests and affiliations that stretched far beyond the humdrum official routine. Every one of them warmed both hands at the cheerful fire of English existence with a palpable relish. Every one of them was a great social success, and a success not less pronounced in his purely business and bargaining hours. Every one of them touched life at a hundred more points than the average professional diplomatist. Indeed, if a tongue-tied, unsociable, narrow-gauged, inflexibly official Ambassador from the United States has become unthinkable to us, he is not less incredible to the Americans themselves. Our importunity finds its soundest defence in their responsiveness. America insists sending us her best, and we return the compliment by laying out the gift to the most ample advantage. It is not easy to decide to which side the balance of inconsiderateness inclines. While we are bewailing Mr. Choate's departure, there comes to us Mr. Whitelaw Reid, a known and tried friend of this country, and a publicist who has left a decisive mark on the history of his own. His kindliness, his hospitality, his great gifts of adaptability and ingratiation, his easy eloquence, and the manysidedness of his interests make him at once, and apart altogether from his official position, a prime favorite.

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What are we to do? Are we to lend our ears to those budge doctors of the Stoic fur and praise the lean and sallow abstinence? Certainly not. Instinctively and unanimously we fall to on Mr. Reid; and when England is invited to feel a blush of national contrition at the thought of all the

speeches she has extorted from him in the last four years, all the functions at which his presence has been insisted on, all the addresses he has been made to deliver, all the societies of which the presidency has been forced upon him, all the monuments he has been unable to get out of unveiling, she may fairly reply that the responsibility is as much America's and Mr. Reid's as her own.

The time, however, seems to be coming when Mr. Reid will ask permission to retire. The question of his successor has, indeed, already been canvassed in the American Press, and must, I should imagine, be causing Mr. Taft no little perplexity. President Eliot, of Harvard, to whom the post was offered a month or two ago, and on whose acceptance of it all Englishmen who know him were prepared to congratulate themselves, has apparently felt impelled to decline it; and I have seen no other name mentioned that impressed one as even a probable selection. The office is a peculiar one in many other ways besides those on which I have already touched. The United States possesses some offices in Victoria Street that call themselves an Embassy, but it has no Ambassador's residence. It acts with republican severity on the theory that all work and no sleep, let alone play, makes a good Ambassador. It provides him accordingly with a desk-chair, pens and paper, and the paraphernalia of his official business, but takes no account of his human longing for a bed, or a roof over his head, or anything that might serve him as a temporary home. These are luxuries he is expected to furnish

out of his salary, and the fixed and inclusive salary of all American Ambassadors is £3,500 a year. Out of this they have to pay their own house-rent as well as all private living expenses. This was never a very satisfactory arrangement, even in the days of the modest scholar-diplomat, of men like Bancroft, Lowell, Motley, and Washington Irving, men, that is to say, of comparatively moderate means, who were appointed and welcomed on the strength of their literary laurels, and from whom nothing in the way of a grand establishment was expected. But standards have altered considerably of late years-partly because all the American Legations in the chief capitals have themselves been promoted to Embassies; and the consequence is that only very wealthy men, who are prepared to pay from £10,000 to £30,000 a year out of their private purse, can afford to accept a first-class Embassy, and to keep up the state that the diplomacy of to-day insists upon. In one capital you will find an American Ambassador living in a palace, the rent of which exceeds his official salary; and in another you will find him worse housed than the average representative of a Balkan State. One must remember that in the American diplomatic service there is little security of tenure, no regular and recognized system of promotion, and no pensions; and that all appointments are made by the President from men of his own party, and are liable to terminate at a moment's notice when the other side comes in. Diplomacy, in fact, in American eyes is rather a diversion than a career, and many of the highest posts in the service are given to men who have had no official training, but who like to round off a successful political, professional, or business career by a new and pleasant experiThis, again, helps to limit the Ambassadorships at the great capitals

ence.

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