Page:The Practice of Diplomacy - Callières - Whyte - 1919.djvu/19

 the best of our public servants in the Foreign Service, and having got them there to give free rein to their ability by engaging them in appr6priate work. The Foreign Office is alive to the necessity of reform, and the speeches made in the House of Commons on 3ist July 1918 show the lines on which reform ought to proceed. The details there discussed must be left for treatment in the Press; and it is perhaps not too much to say that the essence of reform lies as much in a change of attitude and of temper in the diplomatic personnel as in the introduction of up-to-date machinery. No public service has undergone so little change in recent years as the Foreign Office. British embassies are still strongholds of tradition; and although the war has already in certain cases revolutionised their domestic administration, we can still say with truth of them what George Meredith said of the Habsburg dynasty, 'What but knocks will ever convince the Black-Yellow Head that we are no longer in the first years of the eighteenth century.'

Till the other day the Foreign Office and its servants abroad contrived to remain aloof from the currents of thought which have carried reforms into each of the great departments of state in turn. xiii