possible, the punishment inflicted by the State should be such that it does not debase the criminal's character, and that it should give him opportunity for amendment of life in future. Those who watch our convict system must have been gratified a few months ago when a criminal on being sentenced to eighteen months' hard labour asked the judge to give him instead three years' penal servitude, that he might have a chance of learning a trade, and so of living an honest life when he was released. The judge very wisely-if one who is not a lawyer may offer an opinion-granted the request; and the incident shows that the remedial element in State punishment is not ignored. Our convicts are not treated vindictively; the State does not avenge itself upon them. But they are punished, for all that, primarily and chiefly because the State desires in the interests of the community to check the progress of crime, by making it dangerous and its consequences unpleasant.

There

More, however, may be said than this about the new doctrine that punishment ought to be solely remedial and educational. This doctrine is not only politically dangerous; it is ethically unsound. Certainly, the incidence of pain in the natural order gives no countenance to it. In the field of nature, defiance of her laws is always punished. Nature never forgives. She exacts the last farthing of penalty. Only the fittest, those who adapt themselves best to their environment, survive; the rest die. is nothing remedial about that law. It is all in the interest of the race, but not of the individual members of the race who have transgressed. Were the transgressor not punished, the race would suffer. Now it may be said -it has been said--that nature is here not our true guide. The individual man is an 'end in himself,' to use Kant's fine phrase; it is wrong to treat him as if his wellbeing were wholly subsidiary to the welfare of mankind at large. The progress of civilisation has been brought about, it is urged, not by following the inexorable teaching of nature, but by repudiating it and by substituting the Law of Love for the Law of Competition. And it is assumed in the argument that the 'Law of Love' forbids punishment as a deterrent! Here is a grave fallacy, and a mischievous one. If the criminal ought to be regarded in virtue of the dignity of his humanity, as an ‘end in

himself,' that is equally true of every one of his innocent neighbours. If it is argued that you have no right to punish him or visit him with pain in their interests, it may be replied with equal force that you have no right to punish them, by exposing them to fraud and violence, in his interests. And this view the law in these countries has always taken. The welfare of the guilty criminal is not overlooked; but it is, quite properly, treated as subsidiary to the welfare of his innocent fellow-citizens.

A study of the parental discipline of a well-ordered nursery would be a useful training for some of our sentimental philanthropists. The law of love punishes a naughty child, not only for his own good, but in order that his good little brothers and sisters may not be seduced into naughty ways by his bad example. To say that nursery discipline does not recognise punishment as a deterrent is nonsense, and yet the law of love is nowhere more tenderly and happily observed.

The truth is that it is a law of God that sin must, and ought to, issue in pain. For this there is some inscrutable moral necessity. To attempt to explain away this law is to run counter to the ethics of the Gospel. This is not the place to treat at length of its deeper teaching; but I will observe that the most tremendous exhibition of the law that sin must issue in pain, somehow and somewhere, is to be found in the doctrine of the Atonement of Christ as unfolded in the New Testament and as expounded by the Church. If the Law of Love involves no more than the remission of penalty and the ignoring of transgression, then, at Calvary, we are faced with the darkest secret of human life. But I would not pursue this topic here. Suffice it to say that the New Testament gives no support to the shallow sentimentalism which would regard sin as no other than a mistake or a misfortune, and as carrying no consequence of pain in its wake. The Law of Forgiveness, the Gospel of Good Will to men, does not mean that men are not responsible for their acts to their neighbours as well as to God. As in the Divine Order sin issues in pain, so does crime issue in punishment in any society whose laws reflect the laws of nature and, so far as we understand it, the law of God.

J. H. BERNARD.

Art. 6. THE OLD AND THE NEW DIPLOMACY.

1. Old Diplomacy and New, from Salisbury to Lloyd George (1876-1922). By A. L. Kennedy. With an Introduction by Sir Valentine Chirol. Murray, 1922. 2. A History of European Diplomacy, 1815-1914. By R. B. Mowat. Arnold, 1922.

A RECENTLY adopted habit of speech suggests a contrast between the old diplomacy and the new. It is well that we should ask ourselves exactly what we mean by this distinction, and how far the antithesis exists or ought to exist. That the manner in which foreign relations have recently been conducted, in this country at any rate, has been a new departure, there can be little doubt; but it is not certain that its significance has been understood by the majority for whom, in the pre-war period, foreign affairs had only a secondary interest. Nor need we assume that recent manifestations have been more than a transitory divergence from the normal course, such as may periodically occur when a statesman with the self-confidence of genius directs the helm of state.

Though the distinction has only obtained currency in the last two years there had been many new developments in the province of diplomacy long before the war. An older diplomacy in which dynastic issues, traditional ambitions and animosities played a part, which was mainly concerned in Europe with the balance of power, may be said to have ended with the Congress of Berlin in 1878, which marked the close of an epoch. The importance of Colonial questions has only comparatively lately engaged diplomatic attention. The vast and increasing influence of the United States, and a growing, if not openly avowed, tendency there to recognise the impossibility of standing aloof from external issues, together with the rise to power of Japan and its consequent effect on interests and issues in the Far East, introduced factors unknown to an older diplomacy, the horizons of which became vastly enlarged. The immediate occupation of diplomacy with economic and commercial questions has been also a comparatively recent innovation, of which Germany was the first country to take advantage. Great Britain's constitu

tional conservatism was much slower to utilise the diplomatic agency for economic expansion, and even in recent years experience has shown with what difficulty a reluctant Treasury can be induced to provide the adequate machinery which, regarded in the terms of insurance on our immense foreign trade, would represent an infinitesimal premium. Finally, the fourteen points of President Wilson may be said to have heralded a new departure in diplomacy, even if the States which accepted them displayed a good deal of the astuteness imputed to the old system in evading their provisions. But it is not these developments which are contemplated by the popular label of the new diplomacy.'

There was, no doubt, a time when a vague impression prevailed that missions abroad were chiefly concerned with plot and counterplot, with webs of intrigue woven in the mysterious atmosphere of exclusive coteries enigmatically referred to as diplomatic circles or the chancelleries. As a nation we cling to tradition, and the average man has probably retained some suspicion that until recently a number of gentlemen were continuously occupied abroad in applying to international questions the counsels and stratagems of Machiavelli. Mr Kennedy, in his extremely able book, the work of an exceptionally shrewd and impartial observer, who has enjoyed unusual opportunities, and so makes what he has to say indispensable to all who desire to grasp synthetically the historic evolution of the last half-century, has pointed out the fallacy of the Machiavellian fable, which, as regards British diplomatists, he considers to have been sedulously fostered by German suggestion. Germany was perhaps not exclusively responsible for an imputation which, however unjustified, could hardly have been plausibly advanced against a service which was not wellinformed and efficient. In ages when other standards of conduct prevailed, British representatives abroad may have played a hand in the game of tripping up a rival, or of misleading an adversary in order to conceal a design advantageous to their country's interest. Devices used by the agents of other states in the Balkans which cannot be too severely condemned have been revealed within recent memory; but it savours of self-righteousness and is hardly fair to refer to such practices as

'continental diplomacy.' Mr Kennedy is, however, undoubtedly right in describing the overwhelming majority of British representatives for many years past as simple and direct men of honour. Intriguers were invariably mistrusted in the British service. Edward Malet,' said Bismarck of an ambassador of the old school trained under Lord Lyons, 'could not tell a lie, not even a political one.' And in political lies Bismarck was himself an adept. If, as Sir Valentine Chirol suggests, he is to be credited with having introduced into diplomacy une franchise qui frise la brutalité, the phrase is incomplete without the addition ‘quand la franchise me convient.'

Generally speaking, the public view would seem to be that the old diplomacy' signifies the method of conducting international relations through accredited agents, experienced in the mentality and traditions of foreign countries, controlled by a Secretary of State at the head of a department of experts, as contrasted with the system which has prevailed since 1919, under which conferences of Ministers, not necessarily those of Foreign Affairs, and special commissions have largely taken over the management of these relations. A further development in this country has been the frequent substitution of unofficial advisers, and of a Cabinet Secretariat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in dealing with important international issues. The old diplomacy has been criticised for having worked in secret, while openness and publicity are imputed to the credit of the new. How far the publicity for which approval is claimed has really prevailed in recent international discussions is open to some question, as it also is whether pending negotiations have not at times been prejudiced, and the position of the negotiator weakened by partially informed controversy in the press, or on the platform, regarding the points actually at issue. At the same time, the value of public opinion as a support to the negotiator in many cases cannot be ignored. The weight of British opinion behind the Ministers who were in sympathy with the cause was an important factor in the solution of the Italian problem in the middle of the last century, and its value was demonstrated in recent days when the renewal of the Treaty with Japan was under consideration. An increasing public interest in foreign questions