Page:Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (1919).djvu/257

 your acquaintance and communicate their ideas to you, I have ever found their professions insincere, and their intelligence false. They have been the first I have wished to shake off, whenever I have been so imprudent as to give them credit for sincerity. They are either persons who are not considered or respected in their own country, or are put about you to entrap and circumvent you as newly arrived.

'Englishmen should be most particularly on their guard against such men, for we have none such on our side the water, and are ourselves so little coming towards foreigners, that we are astonished and gratified when we find a different treatment from that which strangers experience here; but our reserve and ill manners are infinitely less dangerous to the stranger than these premature and hollow civilities.

'To avoid what is termed abroad an attachment. If the other party concerned should happen to be sincere, it absorbs too much time, occupies too much your thoughts; if insincere, it leaves you at the mercy of a profligate, and probably interested character.

'Never to attempt to export English habits and manners, but to conform as far as possible to those of the country where you reside—to do this even in the most trivial things—to learn to speak their language, and never to sneer at what may strike you as singular and absurd. Nothing goes to conciliate so much, or to amalgamate you more cordially with its inhabitants, as this very easy sacrifice of your national prejudices to theirs.

'To keep your cypher and all your official papers under a very secure lock and key; but not to boast of your precautions as Mr. Drake did to Méhée de la Touche.

'Not to allow any opponent to carry away any official document, under the pretext that he wishes "to study it more carefully"; let him read it as often as he wishes, and, if it is necessary, allow him to take minutes of it, but both in your presence.

'Not to be carried away by any real or supposed distinctions from the Sovereign at whose Court you reside, or to imagine, because he may say a few more commonplace sentences to you than to your colleagues, that he entertains a special