Now, in many countries where this happens, the Government is not strong enough or permanent enough to guarantee proper security of tenure to the foreign company to which it grants a concession; very likely some official is bribed to grant the concession to one company and then bribed by another company to cancel it, or the Government is overthrown by a revolution and its successor cancels the concessions it has granted. By this means, British workmen may be thrown out of work and their employment may pass to workmen in the United States or Germany. Consequently, foreign Governments—the Governments of civilised countries—gradually begin to intervene and give protection to their subjects who have concessions in such countries, provided that they have obtained their concessions in a respectable and proper manner. Competition between the different foreign companies then grows up; their Governments gradually begin to support them against each other in this competition, until at last it becomes necessary for the different Governments, if bad feeling is to be avoided, to try to arrive at some arrangement among themselves, fixing the way in which the concessions granted by this or that semi-civilised country shall be distributed among the subjects of the Great Powers. Something like this has been recently happening in China.
To a certain extent this line of action seems to be necessary in dealing with backward countries, and it may be made mutually beneficial both to those countries themselves and to the commerce of the Great Powers, but, on the other hand, the whole policy is obviously liable to great abuse. Consequently, every self-respecting Government knows that all matters relating to concessions must be treated with the greatest caution and forbearance, and that the interests of all concerned will be best served in the long run by gradually helping backward countries along the path of civilisation and strengthening their Governments so that they may be able to assume complete control of their own finance and commercial enterprises.
We have now described roughly the personal and the commercial work of the Foreign Office. This work covers all the immediate interests of individual British citizens in regard to foreign countries. If each British subject is protected when abroad, and if the trade and industry of the country on which the welfare and livelihood of every individual citizen ultimately depends is fostered and safe-guarded, then the primary duties of the British Government in relation to other Governments have been discharged.
But this is not enough. If the interests of the individual citizen of Great Britain are to be permanently secured in relation to foreign countries, we must be assured that the policy of foreign Governments is civilised and generally friendly to British subjects. There must be a general rule of law throughout the world on which British subjects can count with assurance of safety. And so the Foreign Office has a third and even more important class of work:
(3) The maintenance of permanent good relations with foreign countries. These good relations are secured, not only by continually friendly communication with foreign Governments over innumerable questions of policy, but also by the conclusion of a network of treaties, some of them designed to establish international co-operation in particular social or economic questions such, for instance, as the existing treaty between Great Britain and France providing for the mutual payment of compensation under the Workmen's Compensation Laws of the two countries, and others concluded with the object of defining the mutual policy of different countries in general matters such as the regulation of trade. The newest and most important class of treaties are those which, like the Hague Conventions and the treaties guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium and Luxemburg, attempt to lay down general rules of law which all countries agree to observe. In other words, the office of diplomacy is to secure certainty in the government of the world, so that every man may know what to expect in dealing with his fellow-man of a different nationality.
It is difficult to describe adequately the complexity of this diplomatic work. The economic and social systems of the world have become so involved and intertwined that there is hardly anything one country can do which does not react in some way on the interests of the subjects of another country.
In every European country, and in the United States, the Government is being more and more called upon to regulate the delicate economic and social machinery on which modern life depends. Each Government adopts an attitude towards such problems which is determined partly by the thought and the beliefs of its public men, and partly by the course of historical development through which each country has passed. There thus arises gradually in each country a more or less definite policy with which the country becomes identified. Formerly the policy of most European countries was mainly confined to questions arising in Europe itself, but in these days of industrial expansion the real aims of their policy generally lie outside Europe.
There are vast regions of the world where civilised government does not exist, or is only beginning to exist, but where the citizens of civilised countries travel and carry on trade. No civilised country can prevent its traders going where they please—indeed, the prosperity of every great country now depends to some extent at least upon its traders finding new markets for the sale of their goods—but if these traders go to an uncivilised country like Central Africa or the interior of China or the South Sea Islands the civilised country not only feels obliged to protect them there, but it must also, by every claim of justice and humanity, prevent them from ill-using the uncivilised and helpless natives.
The horrors which accompany the unregulated activity of foreign traders in a savage country may be seen from the Life of John G. Paton, a missionary in the New Hebrides Islands of the Southern Pacific. These islands, before they came under the government of any civilised Power, were visited by European and American traders, especially traders in sandalwood. "The sandalwood traders," wrote Paton, "are as a class the most godless of men…. By them the poor defenceless natives are oppressed and robbed on every hand; and if they offer the slightest resistance they are ruthlessly silenced by the musket or revolver…. The sale of intoxicants, opium, fire-arms, and ammunition by the traders among the New Hebrideans, had become a terrible and intolerable evil." It became necessary for the civilised Powers to prohibit, by international regulation, the sale of fire-arms and intoxicants in the islands. Such international regulations are always very difficult to enforce, and finally the administration of the islands was taken over by Great Britain and France, who now govern them jointly.
Hence the civilised countries of the world have gradually been led to assume jurisdiction in uncivilised regions, and have converted many of them into colonies or "protectorates" or "spheres of influence." By this process the interests of the nations of Europe reach out into all the far corners of the earth, and constant care and arrangement is needed to prevent those interests clashing. Where the interests of the different Powers do clash in an uncivilised or semi-civilised part of the world a general international agreement is often necessary to put things straight; for instance, during recent years the interests of Germany, France, and Spain—and to a less degree those of many other countries—were continually clashing in Morocco, till it became necessary in 1906 to conclude a general international treaty called the Algeciras Act, whereby the relations of all the Powers with regard to Morocco were defined in great detail.