Page:The Practice of Diplomacy - Callières - Whyte - 1919.djvu/98

 to his employment on more secret affairs, and though it is true, as we have said, that part of the business of an ambassador is that of an honourable spy, he should beware of doing any of the spying himself. Most of the great events in recent diplomatic history have been prepared by ministers sent in secret. The Peace of Münster, one of the most intricate negotiations I have ever known, was not really the work of that vast concourse of ambassadors and envoys which met there, and appended their signatures to the document. The essential clauses of that treaty were discussed and drawn up by a secret agent of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria sitting at a table in Paris with Cardinal Mazarin. In a similar fashion the Peace of the Pyrenees was concluded as the result of secret negotiations at Lyons between Cardinal Mazarin and Pimentel, the secret envoy of the Spanish King; and finally, the Peace of Ryswick, to which I was a party throughout the negotiation, was devised by the same secret diplomacy before its public ratification in Holland in the year 1697.

Now the bearing of these considerations upon the organisation of diplomacy is fairly clear. If it is only a question of maintaining good relations between one state and another and of rendering a more or less correct account of all that happens at a foreign court, a diplomatist with a couple of