From the personal point of view diplomacy has adhered to the belief in the superior intelligence, ability and foresight in the handling of foreign affairs, on the part of those who by inherited traditions and special experience may be said to belong to a caste distinguished from the mass of humanity. Some one has said, there is a great danger in that there exists a caste of people who have taken the making of history as their profession; who still cling to the erroneous idea that the manipulation of large masses of people, the redistribution of territories, and the modification of the natural processes of grouping and settlement, is history. But such people who believe they are making history are really obstructing it. Even so unusual a man as Bismarck, working as he did on a great national problem, did not gain lasting success in action whereby he endeavored to anticipate the developments of history. The artful contrivance and harsh, ruthless execution of many of his plans left a heritage of evil to the world; but the greatest evil lay in the example given by so successful a man in making it seem that history could actually thus be made. The attitude which is taken in behalf of such men, in claiming for them a completely free and full discretion in controlling foreign affairs, recalls a statement made by H. G. Wells concerning a British leader: “He believes that he belongs to a particularly gifted and privileged class of beings to whom the lives and affairs of common men are given over--the raw material for brilliant careers. It seems to him an act of insolence that the common man should form judgments on matters of statecraft.” The diplomats of the old school indeed do require the people, but only as material with which to work out their grandiose projects. Their view not too distantly resembles that of the German militarists to whom ordinary humanity existed only for one purpose, “to do their damn’d duty.” We should naturally expect to find the greatest secrecy and the most callous use of secretive methods, where absolutism remains most completely established. In the last remaining absolutism, that of Japan, these expectations are fulfilled, both as regards carefully-guarded secrecy of all diplomatic action, and the habitual use of well phrased declarations of a theoretical policy, announced for public consumption, but bearing only a Platonic relation to the details of actual doings. But more liberally governed states have not by any means all freed themselves from this practice, even to the extent of faithfully keeping the representative bodies, and the public, informed of the true character and aims of important national policies.