interests"; they touch great sources of political strength; and
these great interests require to be treated as delicately, and with
as nice a manipulation of language, as the feelings of any foreign
country. A Parliamentary Minister is a man trained by elaborate
practice not to blurt out crude things, and an English Parliament is
an assembly which particularly dislikes anything gauche or anything
imprudent. They would still more dislike it if it hurt themselves
and the country as well as the speaker.

I am, too, disposed to deny entirely that there can be any treaty
for which adequate reasons cannot be given to the English people,
which the English people ought to make. A great deal of the
reticence of diplomacy had, I think history shows, much better be
spoken out. The worst families are those in which the members never
really speak their minds to one another; they maintain an atmosphere
of unreality, and every one always lives in an atmosphere of
suppressed ill-feeling. It is the same with nations. The parties
concerned would almost always be better for hearing the substantial
reasons which induced the negotiators to make the treaty, and the
negotiators would do their work much better, for half the
ambiguities in treaties are caused by the negotiators not liking the
fact or not taking the pains to put their own meaning distinctly
before their own minds. And they would be obliged to make it plain
if they had to defend it and argue on it before a great assembly.

Secondly, it may be objected to the change suggested that Parliament
is not always sitting, and that if treaties required its assent, it
might have to be sometimes summoned out of season, or the treaties
would have to be delayed. And this is as far as it goes a just
objection, but I do not imagine that it goes far. The great bulk of