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: