Page:Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (1919).djvu/73

 It is to private letters and confidential communications and to verbal ones that we must look for information of the real influences at work. 'The Emperor of Russia, for instance, is on the whole very friendly to us—from tradition, for family reasons, and so on—and also the Grand Duchesse Hélène, who influences him and watches him on our behalf. The Empress, on the other hand, is not our friend. But that is only to be ascertained through confidential channels and not officially.'

The chief danger to be averted in the conduct of foreign policy is, as has already been said, that of allowing diplomacy to outrun preparations and the strength on which success in diplomacy must ultimately depend. If we turn our view inward upon the nation itself, we shall translate that formula without violence into the expression, that a nation must not acquire a reputation for inconstancy and caprice. In this part of our subject we might have been not unhappily. spacious where we shall now be severely concise. We might cite well-known examples of the inconsistencies, arbitrariness, and excesses of the Athenian democracy in the realm of foreign affairs, and one might point in contrast to the impressive eulogy passed by Mommsen on the Roman Senate in the