Page:The Practice of Diplomacy - Callières - Whyte - 1919.djvu/123

 reports and suggestions can do much to improve even the most mediocre instructions, and therefore the responsibility for diplomatic action is in reality shared in about equal degree between the home government and its servants abroad. The home government cannot know when the opportunity for appropriate action will arise, and therefore the reports on foreign situations which are transmitted in despatches from diplomats abroad ought to be so designed as to present as far as possible an intelligent description of events.

What an astonishing diversity and inequality there is in the conduct of men? No one, not even a minister of state, would think of building a house without the assistance of the best architect and the best workmen whom he could find; but it is the commonest occurrence to find that those who are charged with the transaction of very important state business, upon which the weal or woe of the whole realm depends, never think of entrusting it to trained minds, but give it to the first comer, whether he be a cunning architect or a mere hewer of stone. Therefore ministers and other persons in authority are culpable in a high degree if they do not secure for the foreign service of the state the most capable and sagacious men. For the errors in diplomacy sometimes bring more calamitous results than mistakes in other walks of life, and