What is diplomacy? It dominates that part of political life which concerns the destinies of the greatest number of millions of the human race. It controls a human relationship which has been, and still is, the most powerful and the most prolific of all in producing disasters and miseries; yet which could be, and ought to be, the most pregnant with blessings for each individual amongst these millions.<br><br>Yet despite this, it is the one department of politics concerning which there is the most colossal ignorance.<br><br>The result of this universal ignorance is that while progress has taken place, as education advanced, in other departments of public life, diplomacy still survives m the most disgracefully primitive condition of the darkest ages of ignorance.<br><br>As in early centuries men, through ignorance, did not question the power of the medicine-men or priests to discuss and control the destinies of their souls, and dictate according to their whims whether each man's eternity was to be spent in some heaven or hell, so the democracies still, through ignorance, submit to a similarly fraudulent claim upon the part of political medicine-men or priests to use their whims or class interests unquestioningly to decide whether their present existence shall consist of earthly embodiments of either this hell or heaven.<br><br>I am not arguing that the ignorance of the peoples of former times was their crime, any more than that the present ignorance of diplomacy or international relationships is the result of universal criminal propensities. It is a calamity, and when once recognised, its continuance is a disgrace.