Object lessons were before them. During Polk’s Administration, James Buchanan, then Secretary of State, had removed, or rather transferred to another post, a United States Minister to one of the South American Republics on the Pacific slope. This Minister had committed the, in United States “diplomacy,” unpardonable offence of indorsing the drafts of certain whale-ship captains upon their owners in New Bedford and Nantucket. The ships of these captains were in distress, having been dismasted in tempestuous passages around Cape Horn, and they had made their voyage to Valparaiso under jury-masts. Arrived there, they needed money to repair and refit their battered and storm-beaten ships. Our Minister to Chile used his good offices to help them get their drafts cashed so they could repair their vessels and pursue their voyages. This, from the view-point of primitive United States “diplomacy,” was of course a crime, and the Minister was made to suffer for it! Ultimately this unwritten law or tacit doctrine found expression on the floor of the Senate, in a debate on the Consular and Diplomatic Appropriation, from the lips of Thomas F. Bayard: “The purity and dignity of our foreign representation,” he said, “must be preserved! The law now recognized, though unwritten, should be made statutory! If an American Minister abroad should use any of the influence or employ any of the prestige or credit which he may derive from his status as a representative of this country to aid or further or promote any scheme or project of American citizens in that country, having private gain in view, he should be held answerable for official misdemeanor!” Buchanan and Bayard have already found their proper levels in American history, and need not be discussed here, even if their memories were worth discussion. But the theory they applied to our diplomatic representation was for many years the rule. The result was that our “diplomatic service” (so-called) down to, we may say, the end of Cleveland’s last Administration, had become little else than a hospital for political cripples, or a sanitarium for over-worked old lawyers and nervously prostrated college professors. It was the laughing-stock of foreigners and the object of cynical, albeit good-natured, contempt on the part of our own people. It had become a symposium of urbane uselessness and solemn stupidity. All this was changed in our representation at St. Petersburg in 1898. Our Ambassador there was the Hon. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, of Missouri. He was neither a political cripple, nor an overworked old lawyer, nor a college president needing a gilt-edged vacation.