Ambassadors and Diplomatic Missions.

There is, we will venture to affirm, no branch of our multifarious civil services which required to be more keenly investigated, and more unsparingly cut down than our foreign embassies. The Whigs have paired off a little of the exuberance of these dazzling employments; but their reductions ought to have been carried still lower. The embassy to the court of France is still continued at £11,400 a year, independently of a splendid house to live in, bought with the public money; that to Russia as much, with £1000 a year additional for house rent; to Austria, £11,050; to Turkey, £7,350; to Spain, £7,350; and the ministers to the new states of America have £4,000 a year and upwards: and these exclusive of allowances for outfits, for presents, for the charge of journeys to and fro, for postage, for mourning-dresses, for birth-day fêtes, for illuminations, or any other casual outgoing. No other country makes such extravagant allowances to her ministers. Few native noblemen of any of the courts here enumerated are able to vie, in household expense, with men possessing such princely incomes; and it cannot be politic in England to place her representatives in a point of view so invidious towards the communities among which they sojourn. In fact, it is said that hints have, at various times, been transmitted to the government of this country upon the annoyance which is often felt abroad at the unequalled revenues allowed by Great Britain to her diplomatists at foreign courts, for the support of what she calls her dignity. Now, the best kind of national dignity is that which renders justice, and demands it—that which is upheld by the urbanity and knowledge of the public officers who represent their nation amongst foreigners; and, after the common decencies of respectable life have been furnished, little if any thing is gained, by mere extravagance and ostentation, to the interests or dignity of a great people. America allows her envoys and plenipotentiaries about £2000, and secretaries of legation £321 per annum; and her dignity and interests are adequately sustained and represented.

Nothing, indeed, can be plainer than if men of a high order of talents, but of private station in society, were to be selected for foreign missions, two good effects would follow. The national business would be incomparably better done, and the extravagance of the diplomatic service might be corrected without a murmur. It is far otherwise when men of noble birth but mean capacity, make love to the appointment, and are chosen: that is the secret of our vast expenditure in diplomacy. The borough system has been at the bottom of this abuse, as of every other; and if the puppets of that system did not always succeed in shutting the doors of Parliament against popular representatives, it is certain that they kept the representation of the sovereign elsewhere very snugly and comfortably to themselves.

In the whole range of the public service, nothing accords so well with the taste and acquirements of the aristocracy as this vice-regal mimicry and ostentation. The chief qualifications of an ambassador are that he should be able to bow gracefully, be six feet high, of portly presence, and keep a good table for the entertainment of absentee lords and ladies; as to real business, it is done by the secretaries: and if any thing extra occurs, there is a special mission for the purpose. Some of the most famous jobs in the history of corruption have been got up under the pretext of an embassy. Witness the mission of the late Mr. Canning to Lisbon. It is well known that the son of this gentleman was in a declining state of health, and required a milder atmosphere; when the father was sent ambassador to Lisbon, where there was actually no court, at an expense to the country of eighteen thousand pounds. Again, in 1821, when a negotiation was on foot to bring the Grenvilles into the administration, one of the stipulations was, that a member of the family, Mr. Henry Wynn, should be sent on a mission to Switzerland, with a salary of £4,000, and this large allowance was justified on the pretext that it was necessary to enable the minister to maintain a liberal hospitality towards his countrymen abroad. And sure enough the hospitable disposition of this young gentleman was soon called into exercise, for he had scarcely arrived at his destination before his brother, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, Lady Harriet Williams Wynn, and eight more Wynns repaired to Berne, to share the hospitalities of the generous youth, provided out of the taxes of the people of England!

But even these jobs are nothing to those perpetrated in the latter days of Toryism, under the pretext of missions to South America, and to the particulars of which we shall introduce the reader from a parliamentary paper, No. 318, of the session of 1830.

As a sample of the enormous charge of these diplomatic missions, we shall first cite the Mexican embassy. In the year 1825, Mr. Morier received, for five months’ service as Mexican commissioner, £3,655 salary, and £1,670 expenses. In the next year, the same gentleman received, for three months’ service, £3,594; making a total of £8,917 for eight months in two years. This, one would think, quite enough for the cost of one mission, but it was not so: Mr. Ward, the second commissioner, received a much larger remuneration for the same services, in the same year, in the same place. In 1825, this gentleman received £10,920; in 1826, £5,598; in 1827, £2,523, exclusive of £825 passage-money, making, with other items, a charge of not less than £19,808 for twenty-five months’ services of Mr. Ward alone. But even this did not include the entire cost—there was a secretary attached to the mission. This gentleman was a Mr. Thompson, who charged £100 per month salary for his services, and actually, in addition, asked for compensation—for what? Why, for his salary as clerk in the Audit Office while he was absent on other duties. The same modest officer also charged £1,607 for the cost of a trip to Guatemala, which he fancied to take. This made an entire charge of £31,857 in two years for one mission to Mexico.

One object of Mr. Ward’s mission, according to the explanation of Mr. Goulburn, was to ascertain what the expense of these South American embassies might be; and it must be allowed that Mr. Ward went the right way to work to make them very comfortable appointments for his successors, by not fixing the standard at too meagre a scale; and if the gentlemen who succeed him can only get up a book beside, as their predecessor has done, they will be very productive excursions indeed.

The next mission deserving attention is that to Columbia. Our envoy there was a Mr. Cockburn, who, in 1825, received an outfit of £3,000. In 1826, he went to South America, landed at the Caraccas, and never advanced to Bogota: he remained three weeks at the house of the consul, and then returned. For this excursion, he received a year’s salary, £6,000; allowance for house rent, £600; expence of conveying him out, £450. Next year he started again for Bogota, never reached his destination, returned to London after an absence of seven months, to announce his own movements instead of transmitting despatches in the usual way, charging £3,376 for this trip. He thus crossed the Atlantic twice, at the public expense, without ever penetrating to the capital to which he was officially appointed; he was the first year three weeks in America, and the second nine weeks; and for his services altogether he received £13,000. It might be thought after this we had done with this gentleman, but something remains—he applied for farther remuneration, and actually received £1,664 to “complete his allowance;” and then this highly efficient envoy extraordinary rested from his labours on a pension of £1,700 a year.

Next we come to Mr. Chad, who was recalled from Dresden, to proceed forthwith to Bogota. He got £1,666 for an outfit in the year 1828, together with £1,374; and in 1829, £2,062, although he never left London. Mr. Turner got, in 1829, £2,500 for this same mission, besides a large sum for house-rent, he never having been in Columbia at all; and £528 for his voyage out. In this manner Mr. Cockburn received £15,000 for going out, but never entering the capital; Mr. Chad got £5,002 for preparing to go out, but never going at all; and Mr. Turner, £4,955 for undertaking the voyage: whether this last gentleman has arrived at his destination, or absconded, or deviated into a more pleasant tour through Switzerland or Italy, does not appear. So much for the Columbian mission.

Next let us advert to the mission to Buenos Ayres. The first on the roll is Lord Ponsonby, who received an outfit of £2,500, salary £5,000, and an allowance for house-rent £500. These allowances are a little extravagant, but his lordship, unlike the Chads and the Cockburns, did arrive at his post. We cannot say the same of his successor, Mr. Henry Fox, the near relation of a well-known duchy sinecurist Mr. Fox received an outfit of £1,500 for Buenos Ayres, in 1828, at the time he was in Italy, in the receipt of a salary; and, in 1829, an advance of £1,000, though it did not appear, when the return was made, he had yet taken a step towards his American journey. There is similar profusion in the missions to Brazil and Panama, but the instances we have cited are sufficient specimens of the lavish proceedings in this branch of the foreign department. It is to be hoped our Whig ministers, who showed up these doings with great gusto while out of place, will not follow the profuse example of their predecessors in office.