HC Deb 31 July 1918 vol 109 cc551-71

Resolution 2 read a second time.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

Mr. WHYTE

I wish to employ the opportunity offered, during the brief space of time which remains to us this evening, to raise the question of the administrative reforms of the Foreign Office and the changes which are contemplated, both with regard to it and with regard to the Diplomatic Service, though the time at our disposal is not as lengthy as I might have wished. More than once during this Session circumstances have prevented us from raising this question, and I suppose we must be grateful for having this small opportunity offered to us at the very tail end. It is no disparagement to the subject which the House has been discussing this afternoon, if I say that when we see the question of the reform of a great institution like the Foreign Office relegated to the fag-end of a long day's Debate, it would almost seem as if we were suffering from a lack of the sense of proportion; not, as I say, that I disparage for one moment the importance of the question of coal control, which, I believe, will bulk more largely in importance in the coming winter. I hope the day is not very far distant when the country will realise that these two things, the domestic concerns of a nation like ours, and its foreign action, and especially the efficiency of its foreign action, are very closely related, so closely related, that any attempt to divorce them must necessarily be fraught with great peril. For various reasons, I presume that the scope of the discussion, which might otherwise have ranged over a wide variety of subjects, will be restricted to the reforms which are in contemplation by the Foreign Secretary in his own Department and in the Diplomatic Service. That is quite proper, for, while we might be tempted to raise issues of policy on the Foreign Office Vote, we have each to remember that policy cannot very well be a really relevant issue, because, though it may seem paradoxical to say so, the Foreign Office is not the author of foreign policy, because foreign policy is a Cabinet matter, a Government matter, it has always been so; and to-day, if one may judge by certain signs, even more so than ever it has been in the past. Therefore, when criticism has been levelled at the Foreign Office, it has sometimes been marked by some confusion of thought, for the real attack which can be made effectively on our foreign action throughout the War, as far as concerns the action of the Foreign Office proper, is an attack upon the efficiency of its personnel in the task entrusted to them. The present distrust of the Foreign Office and of the Diplomatic Service, as my Noble Friend is well aware, is widespread, and though in some respects it may be accepted, and though in other respects it may be founded on false assumptions, nevertheless, the very fact that the Foreign Office has found it necessary to reform itself and to accept the reforms suggested by the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, so far as concerns the Diplomatic Service, shows that even the Foreign Office is conscious that all is not well within its own house.

I think it is a remarkable circumstance that when the Foreign Secretary came to the task of strengthening his own Intelligence Department, he found his most useful assistance not in the ranks of the official professional Diplomatic Service, but almost altogether in outside circles. I, for one, welcome the steps that have been taken to extend and strengthen the Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, having regard to the fact that this is one of the most essential of all reforms. I must lay some stress on the point that in seeking to strengthen the Intelligence Department my right hon. Friend found it necessary to go beyond the ranks of the Diplomatic Service to find his assistance among foreign subjects elsewhere. The subject of reform is a large one, and, in view of the short time at our disposal, I shall not attempt to develop it at any great length, and it is therefore that I have cut short the general considerations which, if circumstances had permitted, I should have liked to develop at much greater length than I have. I will now go to the essential substance of the reform in the administrative machine itself. An obvious reform is that the present divorce between the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service should come to an end. I believe that the principle of that is generally accepted in the Diplomatic Service, if not in the Foreign Office itself. That being so, I shall not go into details to show the manner in which this divorce has worked to the detriment of both branches of the Service, except to say this, that if a Diplomatic Service is to be efficiently representative, not merely within the narrow bounds of diplomacy proper, but in a more general way in its stations abroad, it must have opportunities of keeping itself in touch with current movements, social and political, at home. In past circumstances it was only too natural that the diplomatist on leave should endeavour to cut himself off altogether and to take a real holiday when he returned home, rather than devote himself to the task of trying to understand the ways in which political opinion and political outlook had changed since he left his native country. But I think it will be understood now, when democratic movements play such a large part in influencing diplomacy, and certainly in the future will play a much larger part, that the diplomat should be enabled to keep himself in contact, especially with the political movements of his own country, and also, of course, with the political movements of the country in which he represents us abroad. On the other side, regarding the desirability of making, at all events, the junior ranks of the Foreign Office itself take some service abroad, it is quite obvious that the present system, by which all reports sent home are left to the interpretation of officials who in very many cases have never themselves been on any official mission abroad, leads to constant misunderstanding and misinterpretation of their meaning. The results which are expected to flow from an interchange between the two Services, of course, cover a much wider ground than that which I have sketched, but, as I believe that my Noble Friend is friendly to that proposal, I shall not endeavour to press it any further at this moment.

10.0 P.M.

The general substance of the reforms which are desired have become more or less common knowledge, and they are, I believe, more or less accepted by the Foreign Office itself. The proposals made by the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, which devoted considerable attention to the question of the reform of the Diplomatic Service and the Foreign Office, have, I think, sunk deeply into the public mind, so that in their major and principal outlines they are already well known, and the gathering force of public opinion behind them has persuaded the Foreign Office and the Foreign Secretary in a large measure to adopt them. Let me say at once that in any criticisms which are offered, and certainly in criticisms which I offer, I would not have it understood that those who really know the conditions, either in the Foreign Office or in the Diplomatic Service, are hostile to the existing personnel, for I have good reason to know that there is probably a majority in the present Diplomatic Service which is most anxious for reform, which feels that the present system is like a prison-house, in which progress is impossible, and, therefore, when we, in the efforts which we have made in the past year or two, have pressed upon the attention of the Foreign Secretary the desirability of introducing immediate reforms, we were not expressing either irresponsible criticism from the outside or even informed criticism solely from the outside. We were also expressing, as I know well from assurances which I have received from many sources, the considered and definite opinions of those who are best able to judge, namely, those who have suffered under the faults of the existing system. The substance of the reforms which are asked for I will recite very briefly. There is, first of all, the conditions of entry. I believe it is essential that the conditions of entry should be so designed as to attract the very best possible merit to the Service, and that the hampering financial and social conditions which have been imposed in the past should be utterly swept away, so that this Service, which I am sure the House realises, though it does not often pay much attention to it, is in many ways one of the most vital of public services in this country, may attract the very best material that this country produces. That can be effected by a reform of the conditions of entry, by a removal of the salary qualification, and by an improvement of the salaries paid to the lower ranks of the Diplomatic Service, especially from the first moment of entry. It is quite absurd that a young man who has taken the trouble to equip himself by studies for work, such as the Diplomatic Service offers, should be compelled, as he has been in the past, to go through a sort of apprenticeship, during which he receives no financial recognition from the State. That, I believe, my Noble Friend intends to sweep away, and I hope that the system which he proposes to introduce will carry with it the immediate payment, on appointment to a post in the Diplomatic Service or the Foreign Office, of an adequate salary for junior Attachés. As to the conditions of his service, once he is in the Diplomatic Service, I am not going to enter into the detail of the obstacles to promotion or the means which can be taken to remove them, but I want to deal very briefly with the kind of occupation in which an Attaché is engaged in the early years of his diplomatic service. I do not believe there is a single man who has ever been in the Diplomatic Service who will not tell you that the first years of his life in that service were absolutely wasted from the point of view of diplomacy. He has been turned on to menial tasks which anybody with a very small mechanical training in shorthand and typewriting could perform just as well as, and probably better than, he could, and most likely, with a certain amount of training, with an equal discretion, and the conception of an Attaché's duties which has prevailed in the Diplomatic Service up to the present moment is a conception which can hardly have come from anywhere but Bedlam. No doubt it was due originally to the fact that dispatches were copied out in longhand, and in the old days—and I know the prejudice prevails in the minds of many Ambassadors to-day—it was thought that the whole work of diplomacy was of such a nature as necessarily to be withheld from the gaze of anybody but qualified persons, whatever that might mean.

The release of the junior ranks of the Diplomatic Service from the clerical work of the Chancellery is an essential part of the necessary reforms, and that, of course, implies an extended clerical service, for which I hope my Noble Friend will receive an adequate Vote from the Treasury. There is no doubt whatever that, having released the diplomatist proper from these duties, you must equip every mission abroad with an adequate clerical staff for its various duties of indexing the archives, and so on, and if the Attaché is so released, then I think we may expect him to be able to offer proofs, from time to time, of the capacity which he has shown in diplomatic work, and of the manner in which he has expended his time in studying the great problems in the countries to which he is accredited. I think it would be a good thing if the Foreign Office were to revive a practice, which, I understand, was originally introduced by Lord Rosebery when he was Foreign Secretary, of requiring Attachés in the Diplomatic Service to keep a record, in the form of a diary, of information of all kinds, chiefly, of course, political information, which came to them from all sources; and I think that one of the means for discovering the best candidates for promotion from time to time would undoubtedly be through the medium of an examination or some sort of test based upon the keeping of diaries of that kind. After all, we have not passed the stage when the collection of information in salons and other places abroad can be neglected even by the most democratic diplomatists. The Attaché to-day ought to be encouraged to keep his eyes and ears open, and act as an effective channel for his chiefs, and I would suggest this other way to test the manner in which the Attaché has proved himself worthy of pro motion. In other services men do not consider it derogatory to themselves to submit to examination. In the Navy promotion depends on efficiency in certain examinations, and I would submit to my Noble Friend, if he is not prepared to adopt the proposal of actual examination, that he might set up the system of requiring each Attaché, after a period of service in any given centre abroad, to write a monograph upon a subject connected with the diplomatic work of his mission, or upon a contemporary political movement in the country to which he was accredited. If the Attaches were encouraged to do that, and knew that that kind of test lay ahead, I am sure it would enormously increase their efficiency as representatives of Great Britain abroad, and, once they were released from the kind of clerical duties which now occupy them, they would welcome the opportunity of devoting themselves to studies of that kind. And those studies need not take them away from the work of diplomacy proper. Indeed, I should be inclined to say that the more this system v, as developed and the more Attachés were encouraged to prepare themselves for the test, the more it would be found that the subjects they dealt with were the very stuff of diplomacy in the future.

If the reforms the Foreign Office has in contemplation follow broadly the lines which I have so briefly and inadequately described, I am sure a good beginning will have been made. But the essence of the thing is that the Government and the Foreign Office should take a more liberal view all round of the business of diplomacy, that it should not be regarded simply as a profession devoted to the furtherance of the diplomatic and political designs of this country, and the frustration of hostile designs. First and foremost, British diplomatists should be regarded as the national representatives of Great Britain in foreign countries, and the old idea that the Diplomatic Service ought necessarily, by the traditions of its work, or by the unwritten law of tradition, to be shut off from the great tide of common life in social movements and politics flowing through foreign countries, should be wholly swept away, and that the Diplomatic Service should indeed be, not only the agent of policy, not only, I might say, the eyes and ears of the home Government, but truly the representative of the British people in every aspect.

Mr. PONSONBY

I am very glad that we have got this opportunity, although it is a brief one, of touching upon what I conceive to be one of the most important branches of the public Service. The Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service are, as my hon. Friend has just said, the eyes and ears, and, I would add, the voice of Great Britain in foreign countries, and therefore it is impossible to over-estimate the importance of getting this machine in a really efficient condition. I am very glad that the Noble Lord is here to-night in order to tell us to what extent the reforms recommended by the Royal Commission are going to be adopted by his Department. I know he has taken an interest in this subject especially, and his recent promotion, upon which I should like to congratulate him, will enable him to stand up to the other Government Departments that very likely may be inclined to place difficulties in the way of accomplishing the reforms which he desires. I do not want to cover ground which my hon. Friend has already covered with regard to particular reforms, but I would point out that there is no service that has been so affected by the changes in our modern life as the Diplomatic Service. The electric telegraph produced an absolute revolution in the Diplomatic Service. Representatives abroad, who were their own masters, and had to act entirely on their own responsibility, and were cut off from communication with the Mother Country for months at a time, are now practically at the end of the telegraph wire. But, while the great centralisation of responsibility has been brought about in the Foreign Office itself, at the same time that has not minimised the importance of our diplomatic representatives abroad in any way, because their duties now are far greater than they have ever been in the past, and, although they are in frequent communication with headquarters, the complexity of modern diplomacy demands that those men should be highly trained and perform their work efficiently.

There are many men in the Diplomatic Service whose careers have been spoilt simply by the system. There are many men of high capacity I have known who have gone into the Diplomatic Service and passed from one capital to another without any encouragement being given to them, and who have been prevented from developing their natural capacities. Unless this is drastically dealt with, and unless the Report of the Royal Commission is going to be treated unlike any other Report of Royal Commissions, and is acted upon immediately, we are in very great danger of the old system still getting the upper hand. My hon. Friend has dealt with the question of the amalgamation of the two Services. That, obviously, is a reform that is very necessary. Any antagonism between the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service which has existed hitherto should be eliminated. As Sir Robert Morier once said, the Foreign Office wants internationalising and the Diplomatic Service wants nationalising.

My hon. Friend has dealt with the necessity of open competition in the Diplomatic Service, and the abolition of this grotesque income test of £400 a year. Some people in this country refuse to believe that is a fact, and that the possession of £400 a year should be regarded as a necessity for anyone entering the Diplomatic Service, and that, so long as a man is in possession of £400 a year, he can be entrusted with diplomatic secrets, but that the second division clerk who has not £400 a year is not to be allowed to type them, so that the man in possession of £400 a year, not knowing how to type, has to spend hours in copying dispatches.

Sir J. D. REES

He has to pass an extremely difficult and competitive examination.

Mr. PONSONBY

But you are not allowed to enter a competitive examination before you have £400 a year. I think that income test is so out of date and so ridiculous that I have no doubt it will be swept away, and that open competition—that is to say, Class 1 examination of the Civil Service—will be adopted. Now there is a point which I should like to bring to the notice of the Noble Lord—that is, the age of retirement in the Diplomatic Service. At present, I think, it is sixty-five, and so long as the age of retirement is as high as that you will get men in the higher grades staying on in the service with the view to getting the pension, blocking the higher grades so that promotion will be impeded all along the line. I think there are many instances which could be given as examples of that. I think a reform should be instituted to allow earlier retirements than sixty-five, in order that pensions should be secured and a Minister allowed to leave the Service. One more point I should like to dwell upon—that is the appointment to the lower ranks of the Diplomatic Service. It has been the practice hitherto for these appointments to the lower ranks to be largely in the hands of the private secretary to the Secretary of State, who is an extremely important person. I do not think that he in any way desires to have this power allotted to him, but from custom and circumstances it has gradually drifted into his hands. That is a most undesirable state of affairs. Attaché and secretaries in the Diplomatic Service have to go to the private secretary and ask him to go from one post to another to effect an exchange in the Foreign Office for some special appointment, subject, of course, always to the sanction of the Secretary of State, who cannot be expected to know all the junior members of the Service.

This private secretary has complete power over these appointments and changes. I do not think it is at all a good system. I think there ought to be a Board of Appointments. There should not be this desultory shuffling of the Service, so that a man can be sent from Peking to Peru or to Europe, and to all parts of the world, for no particular reason, but that the capacity of individuals should be studied, and that they should be promoted with the object of training them for some special post that is kept in view, and that a period should be allowed at the Foreign Office for them to work. It is an unwritten rule, but it is well known that it is the practice, and a previous private secretary, giving evidence before the Royal Commission, admitted he had largely the appointments of junior members of the Service entirely in his hands. My hon. Friend dwelt upon the work of the diplomatic and the Foreign Office clerks. In the Foreign Office the work has been very largely improved during the last twenty or twenty-five years, owing. I think, largely to the care and attention given to the subject of Foreign Office reform by Lord Hardinge, and certainly now the Foreign Office clerk has a very much better chance at an early stage in his career of doing good work of responsibility and interest. That is a great improvement. Not very long ago when I was in the Service, clerks of eight, or nine, or ten years' standing were still copying out, numbering dispatches or sealing up bags. But to a large extent that has been altered and the Foreign Office clerk has a very much better opportunity of doing responsible work. That is not so in the Diplomatic Service. In that Service there may be some improvement, but I can give an instance of an Embassy not a thousand miles from London in which, during the War, there has been a shameful state of affairs in the way of a large staff of diplomatic secretaries being herded together, doing morning, noon and night work of a purely mechanical character, and not allowed to exercise their intelligence and to undertake any responsible work. They have been doing work which any man who can write and read can perform, whereas they had to pass difficult examinations and get knowledge of the languages of the country where they may be working. I think they might have been doing something of very much greater importance.

That can be rectified by chanceliers being appointed in the Embassies and the present system that is working in the Foreign Office being in smaller extent extended to the Embassies and Legations. I should just like to say a word about salaries and allowances. Certainly I hope, if the income test is abolished, an adequate salary will be given to the Attachés who enter the Service, and that those salaries will be supplemented by allowances for a knowledge of international law and for languages. I suggest that these two subjects should be treated seriously, and not really as more or less of a joke, as they are at present. The examination for international law is not a serious examination at all. It is not taught in a way to make the students understand it, and the examination is no test. It ought really to be a serious examination, and the Foreign Office might well supply first-class lecturers and teachers in order to instruct in this most important subject.

The language test is a perfect farce. One hundred pounds a year is given at the present for Turkish, Arabic, Russian, and Oriental languages. With a certain amount of study it is not very difficult to get the £100 a year. But the Secretary is never called upon to exercise his knowledge of the particular language, whereas in other parts, where there is no such arrangement, such as in the Scandinavian countries, the secretary may find it very useful to know the language and do useful work with it, but he gets no allowance for it. The secretary should be able to use his knowledge of languages to some purpose, and should receive an allowance for them, or else you ought to do away with the language allowance altogether. I would suggest that a real knowledge of languages of the countries in which the various secretaries reside should be encouraged to the utmost, and that they should be allowed the £100 per year for a knowledge of languages other than those that they take up in the entrance examination. In the various reforms that take place in the Foreign Office I hope that the whole of the Foreign Office will be included, and that the new spirit will enter into the whole building, from the junior Attaché up to the Secretary of State himself, and that in future the old tradition that the Secretary of State should remain within his four walls and not communicate except through emissaries with the outer world will be swept away. I trust that we shall have Secretaries of State who, like their staff, will travel, and will communicate personally with Foreign Ministers in time of peace as they are now doing in time of war, in order that a more easy, amicable, and durable friendship may be created between the Ministers, and, therefore, through them, between the Governments and the peoples.

Sir J. D. REES

Of the speeches which have been delivered on this Vote there is only one that is really a serious speech, and in that speech the hon. Member stated that the Diplomatic Service was somewhat out of touch with the life of the countries to which the Ministers and Ambassadors were accredited. As regards trade, I think that is to a great extent the case, and if the Foreign Office will deal with the criticisms which have been made in regard to Ambassadors and Ministers in this respect I believe a great step will have been taken in the direction of the reforms which are desired. For the rest I do not know in what respect hon. Members who have addressed the House so ably on this Vote represent a current of opinion in the Diplomatic Service. The Member for Perth (Mr. Whyte) claimed that he did, and he said communications which came to him were proof of that, but they could not be organised communications signed by a large percentage of our representatives, and therefore I submit that you cannot take the opinion of one hon. Member of this House as representing the opinions in this respect of the Diplomatic Service.

The fact is if the affairs of the country were in the hands of a Committee of this House for Foreign Affairs to a greater extent than they are now, there is no proof whatever that they would be better done, and in my opinion there is every prospect that they would not be nearly so well done. Witness at the commencement of the War how in this House many hon. Members, and I was one of them, complained bitterly of the inaction of the Foreign Office in respect of cotton and other matters, and it now apparent that not only to the House of Commons but to the country that the Foreign Office had excellent reasons for staying its hand, and it is now believed that we should not at this moment have had the powerful help we have got from America had it not been for the action taken, not by a Committee of the House of Commons or by public opinion, but by the action of the individual Lord Grey and his entourage in the Foreign Office.

I wish to touch very briefly upon one or two subjects which have been mentioned. A great attack has been made upon the existing unwritten condition that every young man who competes for a post in the Foreign Office should have some income of his own, and the amount of £400 a year has been mentioned. It is extremely desirable that he should have some income, provided he is able and fit for the post in every other respect, and I submit that he is none the worse for having a small income, considering the conditions under which he will have to work in a foreign country; in fact, I think he is better fitted to carry out his duties than if he did not possess some modest competence. The Member for Stirling Burghs (Mr. Ponsonby) spoke as if the young men going into the Diplomatic Service got there because they had £400 a year, but nothing could be further from the fact, and, as a matter of fact, the examination is one of the most difficult it is possible to imagine, the standard required being very high, and even the very flower of our public schools are by no means sure of obtaining those appointments.

The scheme sketched by which members of the Diplomatic Service are to spend their time writing reports and essays, to be submitted, I suppose, in the morning with his breakfast, to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, presents the duties of these gentlemen in the most absurd manner, and I am a little surprised to hear so impracticable a suggestion. It is true that the younger members of the staff are occupied for years practically coyping letters, but it should not be forgotten that a staff of clerks cannot accomplish these duties, not because they are difficult, but because there is the utmost need for the strictest secrecy in regard to those documents, and you cannot find clerks all over the world for performing that function. With regard to what was said as to foreign languages, I have been at some pains to qualify myself, and I do think that more might be done to encourage the study of languages in the Diplomatic Service. Here, again, one reason why they are not better qualified in these languages is that they need not be. Let Englishman in the Diplomatic Service pass all the official tests and qualify as an interpreter—the highest test known—and yet he will be infinitely inferior to a dragoman professional interpreter. Therefore, though I believe thoroughly that it is most desirable that our representatives and their staffs should quality in the languages of the countries to which they are sent—a very difficult job if they are to do it in all cases—I cannot admit that their usefulness and efficiency are impaired by the want of this qualification, because better interpreters are provided for them than they would ever be if they spent their lives studying Russian and Turkish and all the other languages of the countries to which they are attached. It was suggested that the Secretary of State should be a travelling officer, going round the foreign countries meeting the Ambassadors in order to promote general harmony. What is going to become of the Foreign Office in this country? What is Parliament going to do if when Members want the satisfaction of heckling the Foreign Secretary he is somewhere between Pekin and Peru? It is not practicable, and it is not reasonable. I venture to submit that the work of the Foreign Office is exceedingly well done. It is by no means certain that the reforms suggested would improve it, and, for my part, I sincerely hope that it will continue in its broader features on its present lines.

The ASSISTANT SECRETARY of STATE for FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Lord Robert Cecil)

I have certainly no complaint to make because this subject has been raised, although the opportunity for raising it has not been an ideal one. My hon. Friend the Member for Perth (Mr. Whyte) began his speech by saying, in contradiction to what we have just heard from the hon. Member for East Nottingham (Sir J. D. Rees), that there was a general distrust of the Foreign Office. I rather think that is exaggerated. At any rate, I doubt it, because I observe that precisely the same criticism is being made in every European country of every Foreign Office as it at present exists. That either shows that all the Foreign Offices are bad or possibly it shows that the work of diplomacy is rather more difficult than some hon. Members are inclined to think. I think it is also due to a certain unfairness, unconscious perhaps, in dealing with the Foreign Office. My hon. Friend the Member for Perth, who is the most fair of mankind, gave us two examples of what I venture to think are rather unfair criticisms. He said that the Foreign Office must be bad because it is preparing to carry out reforms. Of all the hard doctrines pronounced in this House I think that is the hardest: that you are in no circumstances ever to try to reform yourself for fear of it being said that you are not already perfect. No institution is perfect. Although I think, with the hon. Member for East Nottingham, that the work of the Foreign Office and of the British diplomats abroad has been, on the whole, extremely praiseworthy and creditable, I am quite prepared to admit, as I hope my subsequent observations will show, that there is a great deal which can be done to improve it both in its organisation and, perhaps, in its personnel. Another observation made by the hon. Member for Perth was that the Foreign Office had recently established or improved their Intelligence Department, and, in doing so, had gone outside the ranks of the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service in order to man it. It is perfectly true that we have, and I think rightly, obtained the assistance of people outside. The one reason why we were bound to do that was because every single person who was a member of the Foreign Office or the Diplomatic Service was already fully employed. You could not possibly have transferred him to the Intelligence Department without taking him from some work he was already doing.

Having made these preliminary observations, I admit that there are certain reforms which ought to be carried out in the Foreign Office. I am not going to attempt to state to the House in detail the reforms which I think ought to be carried out, but with the permission of the House I want to indicate some of the lines on which those reforms should be pursued. One of them will not be to advocate the creation of a travelling Secretary of State. After all, he is not a commercial traveller. He has mainly to stay at the centre of affairs in London and to direct the foreign policy of the country from the only place from which it can be directed.

Mr. PONSONBY

I do not want my suggestion to be misunderstood. I do not for a moment mean that the Secretary of State should be continually travelling from capital to capital, but that the old tradition by which he never left London at all should be broken, and that, as he does in war time, he should go to Paris and other capitals on certain occasions, and that such visits should not be so exceptional and should not be outside his duties.

Lord R. CECIL

The hon. Member is quite as well and, perhaps, better qualified than I am to deal with that matter, but I should have said, from my brief recollection of past Secretaries of State, that it is true to say they have done that. I can remember several Secretaries of State who travelled very considerably and who travelled exactly in that way, with the object of making the acquaintance of the principal Foreign Ministers of the day. I will not mention names, although I could mention several of our past Secretaries of State who have done that. However, I do not wish to spend time on that, because there are more important practical considerations. I am and the Government is, broadly speaking, in agreement with the hon. Members (Mr. Whyte and Mr. Ponsonby). The reforms they advocate, generally speaking, are those which we hope to carry out. In particular, it is very important indeed that there should be a complete unification of the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service and very largely for the reasons which have been given, namely, that if it is important that members of the Foreign Office should obtain foreign experience, it is equally important that members of the Diplomatic Service should obtain home experience. Again, it is very important to have complete command of the whole Foreign Service, so that if you have a good man for a particular post in London you can, without any breach of any tradition or anything of that kind, send him quite easily to it. I accept that and I also accept what was very much pressed by both hon. Members, namely, the view that there ought to be a considerable reorganisation of the conditions of work in our Embassies and Legations. I most thoroughly agree that to put down a man who has gone through a very expensive education and passed a very difficult examination, day after day to ciphering, copying, and indexing, and things of that kind, is the most wasteful use of the raw material you have. I hope very much that we may be able, if not to abolish it, at any rate to diminish that work very considerably. I quite agree that there is a certain amount of very secret work which, perhaps, must be left in the hands of the Attachés and councillors, but anyone who has been inside the Diplomatic Service for a short time knows that many cipher telegrams are not really very secret and the world would not come to an end and foreign policy would not be seriously injured if the contents were published. Therefore, even if it be accepted—and I do not altogether accept the view—that the least well paid members of the Service are more likely to betray secrets than the better paid, there is no real reason for confining the great part of that work to the most highly trained of your servants.

I agree, also, broadly, speaking, to what was said about the necessity for doing something to encourage what, perhaps, may be called the post graduate training of the Foreign Service. It is a great pity that you stop a man's training when he enters the Foreign Service, and do not encourage him as much as he might be encouraged to take an intelligent interest in the countries to which he is accredited. Too often you hear of members of a Legation or Embassy who scarcely ever go outside the immediate society of their fellow Attaches or councillors. They do not really mix with the people of the country, and do not take the opportunity of really knowing what is going on. Of course, there are splendid exceptions, but that is only too often the case, and something more should be done—it is rather difficult to devise the exact means—to encourage that kind of training and influence. In the same order of ideas I agree that greater systematisation of promotion ought to be aimed at. It is difficult to devise a perfect system of selection for promotion. No such system has ever been devised in any service, or, perhaps, in any private business, but I am not satisfied that the present system is incapable of improvement, and certainly I hope to introduce something perhaps in the nature of a Promotion Board, or something of that kind, which would improve matters in that respect.

Then I come to another proposal which is made—namely, the abolition of the property qualification. Here, again, I find myself in entire agreement with hon. Members who have spoken. I do not think you can defend for a moment the doctrine that a man must have £400 a year before he can enter the Service. I know of no ground on which that can be defended. In regard to the other conditions of entry I do not think there is any serious bar or impediment. Personally, I agree with the Royal Commission that there must be some power of saying, "Here is a man who, whatever his merits are, is evidently unfitted for the Diplomatic Service." I think we must retain some discretionary power of that sort. It is consistent with the public interests that something of that sort should be retained; but as to the property qualification, that cannot be defended. I do not think it has ever been maintained on the ground that the hon. Member suggests. The real ground on which it has been maintained is that at the present moment a young man cannot live on the salary that is given to him as an Attaché in a legation abroad.

An HON. MEMBER

Often he gets no salary.

Lord R. CECIL

Very often he gets no salary, and even when he gets a salary it is much too small. I am sure you will have to raise the salaries of all the junior posts in the Foreign Service. I think there is no Minister present representing the Treasury. [Attention was here drawn to the presence of Mr. Bonar Law]. Perhaps it is a good thing that my right hon. Friend is here. One should not say behind people's backs what you would not say to their face. We shall have to consider very carefully, not only in relation to the Foreign Service, but in relation to the whole Civil Service, whether we are paying enough salary to compete with the best employers. If you want—and you do want—for these very important duties the best men you can get, you must be prepared to pay something like the best price for them. [An HON. MEMBER: "The market price!"] Yes, the market price, that is a good trade union rule. The whole matter requires very careful consideration. At the present time we are paying a man, generally speaking—I am not speaking of certain exceptional cases—such and such a sum. You may send him—I am speaking of before the War—to Christiania, to some South American port, or to Vienna, places where the cost of living is enormously different. What is the result? You cannot take a man and move him freely from place to place. You have to consider if you take him at a certain salary from a cheap place and move him to a dear place that you are in effect lowering his salary. That position can only be met by giving him a good salary, and, in addition, an allowance. I hope we shall be allowed to carry that out, and that I shall be able to place the matter before the House.

There is one general observation which all the three previous speakers were agreed upon, namely, that you ought to extend the functions of diplomacy. That is obviously true. We have passed the day when diplomacy is merely concerned with international duties—with peace and war and things of that kind. It has to do with a great deal more than that, and in particular it must concern itself with commercial questions. One of the earliest events that happened after I came to my present office was the appointment by the Secretary of State of an influential Departmental Committee to consider this very question. That Committee produced a Report which I think everyone who has seen it considers a most admirable Report. The burden of it was this, that you cannot divorce diplomacy from commerce; that the two things are closely intertwined, and you cannot carry on diplomatic duties without affecting your commercial interests, while you cannot look after commercial interests without having regard to the political condition of the country. That is essentially vital, and I am glad to find, from the general approval with which these observations have been received—[An HON. MEMBER: "No!"]. The hon. Member may be the exception which proves the rule, but I believe it is absolutely true that any attempt to draw a dividing line and saying the commercial interests stop here and diplomatic interests begin would be absolutely impossible and fraught with disaster both to the commercial interests and to diplomacy.

Sir W. ESSEX

That is the German doctrine.

Lord R. CECIL

It may be a German doctrine. I am not afraid of it if it is. Of this I am quite sure that in many respects we shall have to make a change, and the reason is this: I am surprised that the hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Holt), who I understand is a democrat, does not perceive that diplomacy is no longer a question as between Court and Court, but it operates as between people and people. No one can have lived through the three or four years of this War without realising how the work of diplomacy has changed—that it no longer represents the interests of the Court, but it has to act in the interests of the nation as a whole, and must be prepared to deal with those interests. That is an absolutely vital doctrine, and I hope when, at some later date, hon. Members come to consider the Report I have referred to, they will see that any reforms adopted are designed to carry out that central principle.

Mr. HOLT

I listened with very great satisfaction to the bulk of the speech of the Noble Lord, as I happened to be a member of the Royal Commission, and I rather gather that the Report of that Commission is likely to be accepted. I was very glad to hear what the Noble Lord said with regard to salaries in the Diplomatic Service. They are perfectly disgraceful, and in cases where an officer who is married and has a family is compelled to go from one country to another his salary may easily become a minus quantity. It is a really disgraceful state of affairs. There was one mitigation of the ridiculous £400 a year rule. Apparently you had not really got to have the £400 a year. All you required to do was to say that you had it, which is not the same thing. No real inquiry was made as to whether you had the £400 a year or not. Then I would ask the Noble Lord how are you going to deal satisfactorily with the question of promotions and the question of languages? If you are going to have a satisfactory system of promotions it means that men must go from one place to another. On the other hand, if you are going to move a man from Buenos Aires to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Constantinople you would hardly expect him to be proficient in the language of every place to which he is sent. On the other hand, it is most undesirable that a representative in any of these places should be ignorant of the language spoken by the man in the tram-car. I was rather astonished, on the Royal Commission, to find that the representative of the Foreign Office should consider it an unreasonable thing to expect that the person sent to South America should know Spanish, yet, as far as I know, anyone sending an emissary to South America does regard a knowledge of Spanish as absolutely essential to the success of the mission. That is a point for very serious consideration. If you are going to be a satisfactory diplomatist anywhere you ought to be a person who will travel in third-class carriages and tram-cars and ascertain what is the view not of Ministers and public officials, but of the man in the street. On the other hand, the Noble Lord made a reference to trade and commerce with which I profoundly disagree. I disagree entirely with the view that it is any part of the duty of the Diplomatic Service of this country to provide traders with cheap commercial travellers.

Lord R. CECIL

I did not say that.

Mr. HOLT

He said something very like it. That was the view put before us by some of those people who advocate all these changes in the Consular and Diplomatic Services, and who do not care about the expense of keeping proper emissaries of their own for commercial purposes in foreign places. The Noble Lord talked about the duty of diplomacy in regard to representing the interests of a country. But it is not its duty to represent the separate private interests of every individual in the country. That was the real difference. I object strongly to the idea that every single citizen in the country is entitled to call upon the Foreign Office to represent his interests whatever they may be, good, bad, or indifferent, in any part of the world, and to call upon the Government to go to war because his interests have not been satisfactorily dealt with by some foreign Power. Yet that is at the root of what is in the minds of these people. Do let us make a complete severance between this idea of pushing trade and of representing abroad the interests of the country as a whole. I really believe that this German idea, that it is the duty of the Government of the country to push the private interests of individuals as individuals in a foreign country has quite as much to do with wars as most other things. I would earnestly impress on the Foreign Office that they should allow traders to mind their own business and confine themselves to minding those affairs which are the interests of the country as a whole.

Question put, and agreed to.

11.0 P.M.

It being Eleven of the clock, Mr. SPEAKER, pursuant to Standing Order No. 15, proceeded to put forth with the Questions necessary to dispose of the Report of the Resolution under consideration.

Question, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution," put, and agreed to.

Mr. SPEAKER then proceeded to put forthwith the Questions, That this House doth agree with the Committee in the outstanding Resolutions reported in respect of Classes I. to VII. of the Civil Services Estimates, and of the Navy Estimates, the Army Estimates, the Air Force Estimates, the Revenue Departments Estimates, and other outstanding Resolutions severally.