When Alexander himself left the realm of vague ideals and descended to details, his impulses often took a form somewhat like the proposal made to Castlereagh at Vienna, “We are going to do a beautiful and grand thing. We are going to raise up Poland by giving her as king one of my brothers or the husband of my sister.” The British statesman does not seem to have been immediately carried away with this generous design.
It was consistent with the character and temper of the Congress of Vienna that there flowed in it innumerable currents and counter-currents of intrigue. In January, 1815, the representatives of England, France and Austria agreed upon a secret treaty of alliance, directed against Russia and Prussia. When Napoleon returned from Elba he found this document and showed it to the Russian Minister before tearing it up.
The first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by the principles that had prevailed at Vienna. In the details of diplomatic intercourse, indirection, bribery and deceit continue to prevail although in a less flamboyant fashion than in the eighteenth century. As the principle of nationalism comes more clearly to emerge, the secrecy of diplomatic methods is distinguished from the secrecy of diplomatic policy with increasing condemnation of the latter; a greater sense of responsibility to the nation as a whole begins to show itself, and the traditional resources of diplomacy are no longer quite adequate.
Nevertheless, the diplomatic literature of the age still looks upon diplomacy as essentially a tactical pursuit, conditioned by the continuous enmity of states. The French writer, Garden, in his Traité de diplomatie, gives the following elucidation: “Put on this plane, diplomacy becomes like a transcendent manœuvering of which the entire globe is the theater, where states are army corps, where the lines of combat change unceasingly, and where one never knows who is a friend, and who is an enemy. It is a political labyrinth in the midst of which ability alone is capable of moving with ease and without being smothered by detail.”
The memoirs and anecdotal literature of the period afford numerous instances of the persistence of that desire for cleverness in dealing with secrets, which often brings about amusing incidents.
At the time when Frankfort was the capital of the North German Confederation, the Austrian government provided its representative there (Count Rechberg) with duplicate instructions; one to the effect that he must exhaust every energy to maintain the most friendly and mutually helpful relations with Prussia; the other of quite the opposite tenor. The former was to be shown to the Prussians. Unfortunately, at the critical moment the Austrian Minister showed the wrong letter to Bismarck, who guessed the situation; suppressing his amusement as best he could, Bismarck tried to console the embarrassed Austrian by promising not to take any advantage of the slip.
A Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs (Manteuffel) had hired a police agent to sneak into the French Embassy in order to secure some documents there. When he delightedly showed one of the letters secured to General Von Gerlach, the latter said: “I could have written you ten such letters for what this cost you.”
Disraeli, in a letter to his sister, spoke of the Danish Minister at London as his secret agent in the diplomatic corps.
There were also more innocent means of gaining advantages such as are practised in many other branches of human enterprise. For instance, Labouchere relates his discovery, when attaché at Washington, that Secretary Marcy was put in a terrible ill-humor whenever he lost at whist. Upon a hint from Labouchere, the British Minister managed thereafter regularly to lose in his games with Marcy who was immensely pleased at “beating the British at their own game.” Labouchere adds: “Every morning when the terms of the treaty were being discussed we had our revenge and scored a few points for Canada.”
There was all this time an increasing tendency to discount the importance of the traditional arts of diplomacy and to believe that a great deal of this carefully nurtured secrecy was merely a trick of the trade. Bismarck expressed himself in the following language on diplomatic literature: “For the most part it is nothing but paper and ink. If you wanted to utilize it for historical purposes, you could not get anything worth having out of it. I believe it is the rule to allow historians to consult the Foreign Office archives at the expiration of thirty years (after the date of despatches). They might be permitted to examine them much sooner, for the despatches and letters, when they contain any information at all, are quite unintelligible to those unacquainted with the persons and relations treated of in them.” In reporting this statement, Labouchere observes: “If all foreign office telegrams were published they would be curious reading.”[B] He also relates how his youthful efforts at secret diplomacy were received by the Foreign Office. He had succeeded at St. Petersburg in being able quite regularly, through the assistance of a laundress, to get from the government printing office loose sheets of confidential minutes of State Council meetings. When Lord John Russell discovered the method in which this interesting information was obtained, he put a stop to the simple intrigue; Labouchere concludes his account of this experience thus: “For what reason, I wonder, did Russell imagine diplomacy was invented?”