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 Ministers of Europe were, it would have been a consolation. But even this was cruelly denied him. He had gone through all the strenuous forms of diplomacy which meant something a hundred years ago, when there was neither cable nor telegraph, and when diplomats were not merely clerks and auditors of their respective foreign offices. The Secretary had practised all the diplomatic expedients he knew. When he had not made up his mind what to say to an ambassador, he had gone to bed with lumbago. When he wished to impress one of the great Powers of Europe with the notion that it had in him a Bismarck to deal with, he had lighted a cigar in the presence of five full-fledged ambassadors. Remembering how eagerly the world always waited for the speech of the Prime Minister of England at the annual Lord Mayor's banquet, the Secretary had spent a whole month composing and revising his remarks at a great banquet in New York on Decoration Day, and the reporters had got his speech all wrong, and a disrespectful New York newspaper had made game of his trousers, had compared them to Uncle Josh Whitcomb's in "The Old Homestead," and had asked pertinently—or