Naturally enough, one of the questions of greatest concern at a mediaeval court was that of precedence—who was the biggest man, and the next and so on. Talk about comic opera! In more than one historic instance the question of precedence among diplomats, or the consequent squabbles between their trains of attendants, fairly “out-Herods Herod” in farcicalness. “The Conferences of Ryswyk”, we are told, “were held in a house which seemed to have been built for the purpose, with three separate entrances and every convenience for preventing collisions; but it was found impossible from first to last to sit at the single table in the rooms assigned to the mediators, because no agreement could be come to about the order of sitting; in that room they could only stand; they sat in a circle in another room where there was no table. A Latin protocol, which had been preserved of the proceedings at Nymegen eighteen years before, was produced as a precedent, but in vain; it contained a plan of the room used at Nymegen, showing the arrangement of seats in it, together with the positions of the doors, windows and fireplace—for these things may be important in determining which is the top and which the bottom of a table. A round table was used at Cambray, Soissons and Aix la Chapelle; but even a round table loses its accommodating quality when it is discovered that the place of honor is that opposite the door, and that every place of honor has a right hand and a left.” A quarrel between two ambassadors’ wives has seriously interfered with international negotiations, and a coachman’s obstinacy has added thirty pages to the “Compleate History of the Treaty of Utrecht.” MODERN DIPLOMACY—CHARACTER. It is not to be supposed that modern diplomacy has so completely changed character as to lose all of its disagreeable features, for there is still more or less mediaevalism attaching to it—at least if the popular conception be true. And perhaps in some degree it must always be so; for the office is unique in its opportunities as well as its inducements to dissimulate, mislead and misrepresent. In the first place, the diplomat undertakes his mission under secret instructions. The public may know what are the duties of the consular service as fully as the consuls themselves; but not so with the diplomatic service, for to the public it is a closed door. Moreover, our diplomat may reason with himself that business of any kind involving competition is a kind of warfare; that diplomatic business is especially so because it is international, that there is no penalty for the breaking of an international law, and thus he may be led to conclude that “all’s fair in love and war”, especially war.