The nature of the business on hand must largely govern the choice of the ambassador who is appointed to carry it out, and if the diplomatic service be large enough and varied enough it will certainly contain within its ranks many different characters showing a wide variety of aptitude. Thus in all those secret negotiations which are so necessary in order to prepare the ground for treaties it is often found that the ambassador himself is not the best person to employ. It may be highly embarrassing for him to attempt to combine such secret negotiations with the ordinary duties of his office, and therefore a clever man who is not yet clothed with the prestige of high office is a more proper agent for this kind of secret traffic. The very fact that the high public position of an ambassador is apt to make the court and the general public familiar with his person and his face is certainly a drawback 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. [Sidenote: _Each Embassy a Miniature of the Whole Service._]