constantly before the eyes of the civil servants of this country the fear of examination, cross-examination, and re-examination by gentlemen who may be described as professional politicians, would be most disastrous in the public interest. Therefore … I read the Resolution with very little sympathy. I do not believe it is democratic. I do not believe it is practicable. I believe the evils against which it is directed are largely illusory evils. I do not hold the view that antique methods are pursued by diplomatists which no man of common sense adopts in the ordinary work of everyday life. On the contrary, the work of diplomacy is exactly the work which is done every day between two great firms, for instance, which have business relations, or between two great corporate entities which have interests diverging or interests in common. If you are a man of sense you do not create difficulties to begin with. You try to get over all these things without the embitterment which advertisement always brings with it. It is when you begin to press your case in public that antagonism arises. In private, in conversations which need not go beyond the walls of the room in which you are, you can put your case as strongly as you like, and the gentleman with whom you are carrying on the discussion may put his case as strongly as he likes, and if good manners are observed and nothing but fair discussion takes place no soreness remains and no one is driven to ignore the strong points of his opponent's case. Directly a controversy becomes public all that fair give-and-take becomes either difficult or impossible, and if secret diplomacy meant anything so idiotic as an attempt to discuss in public matters in which sentiment, international pride, and international interests were profoundly concerned, I do not think that any sane assembly would ever really try to carry it out in the day-to-day national work which has to be got through. But if all you mean … is that it is wrong for the nations of the world to find themselves hampered in their mutual relations by treaties of which those countries know nothing, that, I think, is an evil. I do not say that there have not been secret treaties which were inevitable; but I do say that, if they are necessary, they are a necessary evil. Please remember that two nations make a treaty together for their
