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14 be about to proceed, they were to be examined in ‘so much of McCulloch’s Geographical Dictionary as relates to that country’. But, at least, it was a background to the international system and the public international law of the candidates’ own day. For that it would not be quite useless.

 

The indispensable qualities for a diplomatist, according to French official statements of the eighteenth century, are prudence, address, and dexterity; alertness, circumspection, sagacity. Our own favourite words for the qualities desirable are ‘discretion’ and ‘tact’: above everything else, tact—the gift of touching and handling with nice discernment and