Page:Paul Samuel Reinsch - Secret Diplomacy, How Far Can It Be Eliminated? - 1922.djvu/53

 40 men from Machiavelli to the present. As in physical science, every factor has to be disregarded except those essential to the experiment which is being conducted, so in the intensive politics of the modern state, in the mind of such men, abstraction is made from all sentiment, virtue and quality, to the sole pursuit of a closely calculated political effect. The same German scholar credits Frederick the Great with a superior straight-forwardness. That quality, however, is manifested by such a man mostly on occasions where he is so sure of himself and of his plans that he can challenge the worst attempts of his enemies to upset them and can confound them utterly by flinging his plans in their faces, as did Bismarck at a later time. A startling and fearless frankness is one of the characteristics of political genius.

But to return to the correspondence of Lord Malmesbury. All the devices and foibles of the profession at that period are there mirrored. When he (still as Sir James Harris) reports the coming of a new French Minister to St. Petersburg, he expresses the hope that the new envoy will not be so difficult to deal with as the present chargé d'affairs, "who, though he has a very moderate capacity, got access to all the valets de