of the needs of the time, and will not be until Callières’s excellent maxims become the common practice of the service. These maxims are to be found in the little book of which a free translation is here presented. François de Callières treats diplomacy as the art practised by the _négotiateur_--a most apt name for the diplomatist--in carrying out the instructions of statesmen and princes. The very choice of the word _manière_ in his title shows that he conceives of diplomacy as the servant, not the author, of policy; and indeed his argument is not many pages old before he is heard insisting that it is ‘the agent of high policy.’ Observance of this distinction is the first condition of fruitful criticism. It is therefore worth while, at the outset, to clear away the obscurity and confusion which surround the subject, and thus, in some measure, to relieve both diplomacy in general and the individual diplomatist in particular from the burden of irrelevant and unjust criticism. ‘Secret diplomacy’ has played so large a part in recent public discussion that the confusion between foreign policy and diplomacy proper has only been worse confounded. And even where the critics of diplomacy have restricted the range of their attack to the question of the efficiency of our representation abroad, the nature of their criticism leaves it to be supposed that diplomacy is the dazzling and perilous craft which figures in the pages of Mr. Le Queux. The picture of brilliant youths and cunning greybeards sedulously lying abroad for the good of their country continues to fill the popular imagination, though a reading of any one of the excellent memoirs of the great diplomatists of the past would suffice to prove that Sir Henry Wotton’s famous witticism far outran the truth. For every occasion on which deceit has been practised, there are a dozen on which the negotiation has followed the obvious course of a practical discussion in which ‘the application of intelligence and tact’ led to an agreement. In substance, therefore, diplomacy demands the same qualities as any other form of negotiation. Its true method bears a close resemblance to a business transaction. The one essential difference between a high commercial negotiation and a diplomatic transaction is that in the former the contracting parties are constrained to observe certain rules, and are bound not only by certain strict conventions but by enforceable laws; in the latter case the parties recognise no bounds to their claims and ambitions except those laid down by a concern for their own convenience, or by the limits of their own military forces. Hence the diplomatist gains an altogether fictitious eminence among his fellow-men and assumes an excessive pride of office because he represents a sovereign state which recognises no master.