Anglo-American Memories

by George W. Smalley

We have sent to England so many different kinds of Ministers and Ambassadors that they must be praised—and, happily, most of them can be praised—with discrimination, and also with brevity, for I cannot go on for ever writing on a single topic. I pass to Mr. Hay. The mansion Mr. Hay leased in Carlton House Terrace was, like all those on the south side of that short street looking on St. James's Park, adequate and even imposing. It was like unto the larger one on the corner, formerly Lord Ardilaun's, now Lord Ridley's. When Mr. Blaine entered it one evening at a concert he said to the friend who was with him: "This is the first really palatial house to which you have brought me." Not a palace, but palatial.

Mr. Hay knew as well as any American then living, or better, what a part social influences could be made to play in diplomatic life. He played that part with distinction. He was born for it. He had cultivated his natural gifts in half a dozen European capitals. He had such a knowledge of England and the English people that it has always seemed a pity he did not write a book about them. But he left a record as Ambassador which tells the story. He was a man who carried his point without a collision. He loved England and was beloved. When President McKinley sent for him to come home and be Secretary of State Hay said: "I am a soldier and must obey orders. But all my fun in life is over."

As it turned out it was not over. A still greater career opened before him, and he was the first American Secretary of State to make an imaginative use of his opportunities, and a great name in Europe and Asia alike. He was the first American Secretary of State to take the lead in a world-embracing policy; to unite the European Powers in support of it; to extract a binding pledge even from Russia; to bring Japan, not very willingly, into this charmed circle; and to lay the foundations of American influence in China broad and deep. We often talk of America as a world-power. We have a right to, and whatever be the more recent, and perhaps in some cases rather doubtful, extensions of our authority, we owe what is best and most lasting in our position abroad to Hay.

None of all this could Hay foresee when he quitted London for Washington. What he knew was that he was relinquishing a place for which he had proved his fitness, and embarking upon the unknown. This sorrow at leaving England was genuine, and the sorrow of his English friends, and—if ever there be such a thing as a general sorrow—of the English public, was not less.

The late Queen said of Hay: "He is the most interesting of all the Ambassadors I have known." If the authority for this is wanted, it was said by the Queen to Lord Pauncefote, then British Ambassador to the United States; and Lord Pauncefote repeated it to me, with leave to repeat it to others, as I now do; by no means for the first time.

To Mr. Hay succeeded Mr. Choate. I hope it will be taken as a compliment if I say Mr. Choate was better liked the longer he stayed. He had, when he arrived, a frankness of speech which is sometimes called American; and is, no doubt, characteristic of certain individual Americans. There is in Mr. Henry James's Bostonians an American banker settled in England to whom his son, provoked by a remark of the father to a noble lord who was his guest, observes:

"Well, father, you have lived here a long time, and you have learned some of the things they say, but you haven't learnt the things they don't say."

It is inevitable. In new social circumstances, time is of the essence. It is no reproach to Mr. Choate that he found it so. He had, and has, an exuberant wit; one somewhat contemptuous of conventions and established forms. He poured it out in floods. He gave free scope to its caprices. When it had become chastened by experience, the English delighted in it; as we Americans have long delighted in it. But time was needed on both sides. The English and Mr. Choate had to become accustomed to each other. In the end they did. A beautiful harmony grew up, and before Mr. Choate went home he was an accepted figure in the society which at first had sometimes a questioning spirit. He, too, lived as an Ambassador ought to live; and in Carlton House Terrace, like Mr. Hay. From the beginning the Foreign Office had found in him, in Bismarck's phrase, a man with whom it was possible to do business. For he had a kind of preternatural rapidity in mastering great affairs, and a marked skill in the composition of public addresses.