Page:The Practice of Diplomacy - Callières - Whyte - 1919.djvu/29

 of foreign political phenomena should be encouraged by fitting rewards granted to those who have furnished reports upon them. Indeed, it would be a useful feature in Foreign Office work if not only a pecuniary reward but a prospect of early promotion were held out as a recompense for well-written monographs on important subjects. Apart from special studies of that kind, and perhaps before a young diplomatist is allowed to embark upon them, his work for the first year or two should be more largely political in character than it now is.

Apologists of the present system will retort that it is the business of the junior diplomatist to carry out the orders of his superiors, and not to pry into great affairs which he may not understand. The reply is that juniors become superiors in the course of time, and have a right to that political training which alone can equip them for responsibility. They can plead with force that even intelligent obedience to orders from above is impossible without the equipment acquired by a more political apprenticeship. And this argument is presented in the hope that the orders given in future may be inspired by the ideas which it expresses. Readers of this little book—which Sir Ernest Satow recently xxiii