He The In the nearer Himalaya-a less splendid-super-pheasants country of stupendous valleys both, and the pine-marten and narrow and deep, of pine forest the gooral and the musk-deer and rhododendron thickets, of and the black Himalayan bear. precipices and snow-the serow All the time you know that the makes his home. You happen serow is there somewhere in on him only by chance. the forest around you. never quite leaves cover, and day will come when, yourself has no fixed feeding-places. unseen, you see him in the And when at last you meet, flesh before you. Take a good there is a snort, and your look at him-you may never serow has silently vanished have another chance. Large away: a solitary Boojum-like and donkey-like, with short person. But while you are curved horns, big ears, black a-hunting of your Snark, you face and bristling main, rough will happen on much else that reddish coat and splay hoofs, is worth the seeing; maybe he is surprisingly like the devil. the scarce and wary tragopan, I think you will agree that you splendid in his crimson and have made an entertaining friend. grey, surely the moonal only THE FOREIGN OFFICE SERVICES. BY A. C. WRATISLAW, C.B., C.M.G., C.B.E. II. THE CONSULAR SERVICE. To find the earliest record of a Consul in history we have to go back as far as the Peloponnesian War, when Alcibiades, having quarrelled with his own people, the the Athenians, and taken refuge with the Spartans, is represented by Thucydides as claiming consideration from his hosts on the ground that he and his father before him had acted as Consul (πpóčevos 1) for Sparta at Athens, and had succoured natives of that country. The office seems to have been common amongst the States of ancient Greece, but to have fallen into disuse with the spread of Roman domination, when, the whole civilised world being under one Government, there was no call for a functionary whose duty it was to look after foreigners. The Consul does not reappear until the Middle Ages, when the Venetians, the great traders of the period, began to appoint commercial agents in foreign countries to watch over their trade and protect their traders, and other nations soon followed their example. England, isolated and commercially insignificant, lagged behind in the race for trade, and it was not until 1485 that Richard III. (who, when not indulging his hobby of exterminating nephews in the Tower, showed himself to be an enlightened and progressive ruler) appointed Lorenzo Strozzi, a merchant of Florence, to be the Consul of the English merchants at Pisa and in the adjacent countries. Το this appointment His Majesty was moved "by observing from the practice of other nations the advantage of having a magistrate for settling disputes amongst them." The King delegated to Strozzi the power of determining all disputes between English subjects in those parts, and doing all things appertaining to the office of a Consul. Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign a Charter was granted to a Company, entitled "the Governor and Company of Merchants of England trading into the Levant Seas," giving it the monopoly of trade in the dominions of the Grand Signor and the Eastern Mediterranean, which Charter was confirmed by James I. and confirmed and extended by 1 The word "pótevos is still that employed by the modern Greeks to represent "Consul" in its present-day signification. Charles II. Among the privileges granted thereby was the right to "appoint Consuls and Vice-Consuls in Venice, Turkey, and the Levant Seas, which Consuls should in those parts have power to govern the merchants of the Company and their factors and servants, and to administer justice and determine disputes amongst them." From this it is evident that by the end of the seventeenth century the system of Consular representation abroad was fully recognised in England as a desirable adjunct to trade. Nevertheless, it is extraordinary how little information is available concerning the history of our Consular Service even in the eighteenth century. The ignorance displayed by Foreign Office witnesses on this subject, as on that of the history of the Diplomatic Service when interrogated by various Select Committees of the House, was remarkable, and probably due to the division of foreign affairs between two separate departments, and to the fact that neither kept regular records. Only little scraps of information gleaned from accidental sources throw light on the manner in which the Consular Service was conducted even in the eighteenth century. Consulships seem to have been bestowed arbitrarily by the Secretaries of State, who exercised their patronage abroad purely as a matter of favour, and with much the same disregard to the qualifications of candidates as was customary in the distribution of sinecures and patent places at home. The office, once conferred, was considered to be the property of the holder to deal with pretty well as he liked. Thus he might hold some other appointment from the Crown contemporaneously, or from age, infirmity, or other cause prefer to reside in England, in which cases no difficulty was made about letting him appoint a deputy to represent him at his post. Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century there was an instance of this. Mr Laird, Consul at Malaga, who died in England in 1824 at the ripe old age of ninety-five, was represented by a deputy for many years before he finally dropped off. In In early days, when Parliament voted certain taxes for carrying on the government of the country and the Sovereign disposed of the proceeds as seemed good to him, he showed a natural disinclination to lessen the balance available for his personal use by overpaying his servants. the case of the Consuls, it is probable that for two hundred years or more they got little or nothing out of the Crown. They had to live on the country where they resided, or rather on the British trade of the place; and for this purpose they were generally authorised by the Sovereign to levy certain dues for their support. In the beginning such dues varied according to the cir cumstances of the particular mously according to the difpost. Thus we hear of the Consul at Cadiz being licensed by the King to charge a "piece of eight" on every cask of oil or wine exported to England from the province of Andalusia. By the latter half of the eighteenth century these specific charges had been replaced everywhere by a due calculated on the tonnage of British ships visiting the port, and in some few instances on the value of their cargoes, which levy was termed "consulage." or In addition to this, which may be regarded as their official remuneration, it was the practice for Consuls to exact fees when British ships or traders had recourse to their services. No tariff of fees was laid down until the passing of the Consular Act in 1825, and it is to be feared that before that date Consuls charged what they chose or could get out of their clients. The whole proceeding was quite irregular. No parliamentary sanction existed either for fees or consulage. One cannot say at what period it became the practice to attach to Consulates modest salaries, paid out of the Civil List, and intended to supplement, not supersede, the ordinary consulage; but towards the end of the eighteenth century a good number of Consuls were in receipt of such stipends. It is difficult to estimate what a Consul's emoluments amounted to under this system. They must have varied enor ferent posts. The Consul at Genoa, Major James Seely, "late of the Londonderry Militia," at the close of the Napoleonic wars was in receipt of a salary of £600 a year, and cleared £2500 from consulage and fees; but he allowed onethird of the latter amount as the remuneration of his ViceConsul, who probably did all the work for him. The circumstances of the Consul at Genoa were peculiarly favourable, for his tonnage dues were swollen by the practice of granting the use of the British flag to Genoese vessels as a protection against the Barbary pirates, and when the activities of these gentlemen ceased the dues fell to £600. The Consul at Cadiz at the same period received a fixed salary of £490 a year, and made an average of £840 out of his consulage, or £1230 in all, which is more likely to have been an ordinary consular income than that of his Genoa colleague in his palmy days. The emoluments in general must have been considered satisfactory, or Consular posts would not have been in such demand as they undoubtedly were. In one part of the world, Brazil, Consuls were, for a too brief period, paid on a lavish scale. It was only subsequent to 1808, when the Royal Family fled from Portugal before the invading French and established itself in that Portuguese colony, that Brazil was thrown open to general trade, and that What, in comparison with the unhappy future which awaited it, may be called the halcyon days of the Consular Service came to an end in 1825, when Mr Canning, who was then Foreign Secretary, determined that it was time to introduce some measure of order into what was little better than chaos. the question of appointing Consuls there arose. The British merchants who were opening up the trade themselves proposed that consular officers should be remunerated by a percentage levied on the value of all cargoes from and to Great Britain, and with a laudable appreciation of the value of the services to be rendered to commerce they estimated that the Consul-General at Rio ought to receive £4000 a year, and the Consuls in other ports, subordinate to him, amounts in proportion. The percentage was fixed on this basis, but British trade increased so rapidly that the remuneration of the ConsulGeneral touched £10,000 in one year, and in spite of the dues being decreased it continued to attain a lordly figure until consulage was completely done away with in 1825. It was an age of live and let live, and the Foreign Office, or Offices, contentedly gathered in its perquisites from the Consuls, and in return exercised remarkably little control over them. There is a legend that on the death of a Consul in some out-of-the-way spot, his widow, a capable woman, continued to carry on his functions and collect his consulage for years, of course with the connivance of the local British community. No rules for the guidance of Consuls in their duties were drawn up until shortly before Queen Victoria ascended the throne. With this object he brought in an Act entitled "An Act to regulate the payment of salaries and allowances to British Consuls in Foreign Ports (6 George IV., c. 87), commonly known as the Consular Act, by which salaries of Consuls were henceforth to be supplied from monies voted by Parliament directly, instead of from the Civil List. The salaries so granted were to be in lieu of all salaries previously paid and of all fees and dues previously levied, with the exception of the fees for certain services, mainly notarial, laid down in a tariff annexed to the Act, and trifling in amount. His Majesty in Council was to increase or reduce the salaries and fees when occasion arose, and Consuls were to be brought under the Act of Parliament establishing pensions for civil servants at home. The salaries fixed in virtue of this Act, though on a not illiberal scale, and, indeed, better than anything the Consular Service was to get again until the last few years, evidently represented on the whole a reduction on their previous emoluments; for, in acquaint |