LECTURE III - THE CONSULAR SERVICE—DUTIES.
Consular duties, like household duties, are very numerous; and about as multiform as they are numerous. The mere mention of them, aside from any description or dwelling upon particulars, would leave little time for anything else to be said in the same lecture. We shall content ourselves, therefore, with a cursory view, a glance over the whole field of those duties, without stopping to distinguish between those of a consul and those of a consul general, or of a seaport and of an inland town.
The following classification will be found to be helpful and very nearly comprehensive:
- (1) Duties commercial.
- (2) Duties in connection with customs regulations.
- (3) Duties to merchant vessels.
- (4) Duties in case of wrecks.
- (5) Duties to officers, naval, diplomatic and departmental.
- (6) Duties to seamen.
- (7) Duties in regard to immigration and quarantine.
- (8) Duties to citizens other than seamen.
- (9) Duties judicial—in non-Christian countries.
- (10) Duties to the State Department.
There are a few others, such as duties in regard to extradition, the purchase and transference of foreign built vessels, etc., etc., which we shall term miscellaneous.