LIST OF MAPS. MAP OF NORTH AMERICA, showing the boundaries of the United opposite page 60 THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE TREATY OF 1783 MEXICAN CEDED TERRITORY, 1845-48 A CENTURY OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY. CHAPTER I. THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. THE British North American colonies sought for admission into the family of nations in a transition epoch in the development of international law and diplomacy. These were the offspring of the latter period of the Middle Ages. Diplomacy could have no existence in the Roman Empire, because Rome would permit no relation with any other state, save that of subjection on the part of the other. Diplomatic negotiations necessarily imply a certain equality of relations. It was not until the modern nations began to be evolved from the chaos resulting from the overthrow of the Roman Empire, and they assumed some degree of stability, and recognized in each other an equality in international intercourse, that international law became a formative code of principles controlling the conduct of nations. Although the treatises of Grotius had been written a hundred years, the eighteenth century, which records the revolt of the American colonies, repeatedly witnessed the disregard of this code and its principles set aside by the more powerful nations. The definition and etymology of the word diplomacy illustrate its history. It may be at this day defined to be the art of conducting the intercourse of nations with each other. A fuller definition is found in the Century Dictionary: "The science of the forms, ceremonies, and methods to be observed in conducting the actual intercourse of one state with another, through authorized agents on the basis of international law; the art of conducting such intercourse, as in negotiating and drafting treaties, representing the interests of a state or its subjects at a foreign court," etc. It is a word of modern origin, not found in Johnson's Dictionary, issued about the middle of the last century, being derived from the word diploma, the significance of which grew out of the practice of sovereigns of the mediæval period, following the Roman method of preservation of important documents, in having their royal warrants, decrees, and finally their treaties carefully inscribed on parchments or diplomas. The knowledge of these ancient documents became a special study by a class of officials, who, in that period, were intrusted with the framing of treaties. The word is said to have been first used in French by Count de Vergennes, Minister of Louis XVI., and in English by Burke, contemporaries in our Revolutionary period. 1 Diplomacy and its code-international law are the outgrowth of the conflict of nations in recent centuries, the slow but steady development and triumph of justice and the principles of humanity over tyranny and force, resulting in the amelioration of the horrors 1 Encyclopædia Britannica, "Diplomatics." |