III.
One correspondent, the length of whose letters was 'fabulous,' was Sir
Robert Morier, then Minister at Lisbon, 'an old friend.'
'He had more brains than all the other Foreign Office servants put together (excepting Lord Lyons and 'old White' and Lord Odo Russell), but, although "impossible" in a small place, he was afterwards a success at St. Petersburg…. He used to send ultimatums to any weak Government to which he was despatched, and he used to treat the Foreign Office almost as badly, for he was the only Minister given to swearing at the Office in despatches.'
Comment on this is afforded by a note of Lord Granville's to Sir Charles in 1884, when the Embassy at Constantinople was vacant: "The Turks had been behaving so badly, we should send Morier, to pay them out." Sir Charles's respect for his friend's 'immense ability' led to his taking great trouble in dealing with Sir Robert Morier's difficulties, put before him in a voluminous correspondence, both private and public, and in return he received 'a veritable testimonial on February 22nd, 1881: "You have done the right thing at exactly the right moment, and this is to me so utterly new a phenomenon in official life that it fills me with admiration and delight."' He had previously noted a letter in which, describing himself as "a shipwrecked diplomat on the rocks of Lisbon," Morier wrote:
"To have for once in my life received help, co-operation, and encouragement in a public work from a man in the Office, instead of the cuffs and snubs I am used to, is so altogether new a sensation that you must excuse my being gushing."
In an earlier letter of the same year there is complaint of the "utter absence of co-operation" between the Foreign Office at home and its servants abroad:
"You who are still a human being and able to see things from the general home point of view, will be over-weighted by two such bureaucrats as —— and —— ."
Morier's plea for reorganization which should ensure "intercommunion and intercommunication" was emphasized a few weeks later by
'a letter from White, then our Minister at Bucharest (afterwards our Ambassador at Constantinople), which concluded with a general grumble against the Foreign Office:
'"… Servants kept in the dark—thorough darkness—as to proceedings in the next-door house cannot be profitable servants, and such is, alas!
'"Yours ever truly,
'"W. A. White.'"
The idea bore fruit in Dilke's mind to this extent, that in
'1890 I was able to give evidence before a Royal Commission in favour of amalgamating the two services, and the Ridley Commission accepted my view and recommended the amalgamation. It was not carried out.'
Sir Robert Morier suffered, in his own judgment, more than anyone else from this lack of intercommunication, and this is probably true because he was restlessly fertile in suggestions, and when these raised opposition he turned to Sir Charles for help. Having just concluded the negotiation of a treaty respecting Goa, he was now pressing hard for another respecting Lorenço Marques and Delagoa Bay, in which he discerned the future gate of the Transvaal, and was projecting arrangements with regard to Portuguese West Africa. In these projects Sir Charles helped him indirectly, as he did in a larger proposal which the Minister at Lisbon was making.
'Morier's letter contained the draft of a proposed Congo treaty, which was afterwards put into shape, which I strongly favoured, and which in 1883, after I had left the Foreign Office, was virtually stopped by the House of Commons. The House and country were wrong, and the Foreign Office right.' [Footnote: This treaty would have associated Great Britain with Portugal in maintaining the freedom of the Congo River and in policing its waters, while it would have established a joint control of the whole Congo basin by the European Powers which had subjects settled in that region. Such an agreement would have altered the course of history in tropical Africa, and the Congo State would never have come into being. See Life of Lord Granville, vol. ii., pp. 341-354.]
Lord Ripon was Sir Charles's regular Indian correspondent, and a letter from the Viceroy in this year begs him not to intermit his communications whenever he could make time to write. To Lord Ripon another correspondent was now added:
'Grant Duff, having accepted the Governorship of Madras, asked me to write to him regularly in India, which I promised to do, and did, and in thanking me he said that my opinions would have interest for him, since among other things I knew was "that strange wild beast—the House of Commons." This saying was pathetic from him, for there never was a man who more utterly failed to understand the House of Commons than Grant Duff….'