DIPLOMACY.

Patea Mail, 31 December 1880, Page 2

DIPLOMACY.

The language of diplomacy has been French ever since the first Napoleon overran Europe. A turn is coming in a curious way. The Czar of Russia has had to receive the Chinese ambassador to discuss the Kuldja difficulty, and the only language which they mutually understood was English, So they talked English, and it is to bo hoped they came to an English understanding. French has been found useful as a conveniently elastic medium for concealing your real moaning in politics. It is a language which admits of infinite refinement in the shades of meaning, so that when you have committed yourself to a statement on paper, you must be a poor French scholar and a very dull diplomatist if you cannot draw more than one meaning from the words to which your adversary would pin you. This elasticity of expression is very convenient in diplomacy. Such a language enables you to hint a disagreeable thing in an airy way which saves you from any suspicion of intentional rudeness, for if the shadowy suggestion happens to be resented, you have a ready facility of explaining that the particular phrase has a colloquial use in polite society which conveys quite a different idea. And so the diplomatists have made a new science which is a sort of talking round a corner. It was a startling shock to their refined sensibilities when the Marquis of Salisbury wrote that blunt despatch, exposing the true meaning of the treaty of Ban Stefano after the fall of Plevna, when the Muscositc conqueror had his hand on the throat of the half-killed Turkey. That despatch was composed in English and translated into French, but the ideas were British, and had all the coarse bluntness which your official diplomatist eschews as rude and ill-bred. It is a pity there is not more of British bluntness put into official diplomacy. Perhaps the Chinese ambassador at Bt Petersburg managed to do it. The Kuldja question has been quiet ever since.