that you are speaking solely of the Consular Service, which is your own field? Mr. SKINNER. That is my service. Mr. ROGERS. And that the personnel of the diplomatic side is not, and under present conditions can not, be sufficiently desirable to obtain for America the best results? Mr. CONNALLY. How are you to change it under the Constitution? President may appoint and remove. No law can change that. The Mr. ROGERS. You can do something to make the personnel of the Diplomatic Service very much better. Mr. SKINNER. It is equally true of the Consular Service that the President can appoint anybody he pleases to be consul or consul general. Mr. TEMPLE. But it is not true with regard to the force under the ambassador or consul. Mr. SKINNER. No. But the President for his own purposes can limit his own power of appointment. It lies within his discretion to say to himself, "I do not propose to select men for these offices unless they measure up to certain standards and possess certain experience." That is in effect what he says in the Consular Service. Mr. TEMPLE. The point I wish to make is that the President does not have constitutional power to appoint secretaries irrespective of the regulation fixed by Congress. Mr. MOORES. Do you mean to have it understood that our foreign service is more efficient or in any other way superior to the British service? Mr. SKINNER. If you speak of the foreign service as a whole, no; I do not say it is superior. I will say I think it has as good raw material as other services, but it is not utilized as it should be and as it could be under this bill. Mr. COCKRAN. There are one or two things I would like to be enlightened upon. You have given us a very good résumé of the business of the consular office in London, consisting of 55 employees, besides various side services, scrutinizing the invoices covering $160,000,000 of goods, which requires a high order of ability in weighing evidence and unquestionable honesty free from any source of corruption. What other consular offices are there that do business on anything like that volume? Can you give us the volume of business of the French consular office in Paris? Mr. SKINNER. Of course the American consulate general in Paris has no shipping business or claims business. In the matter of invoices and value of the exports I should imagine that Paris and London were much the same, and that is probably true also of notarial services. Mr. Lay, who has been stationed at Paris, could tell you more about that than I. Mr. COCKRAN. There are not any two consulates general abroad doing business in anything like that volume? Mr. SKINNER. No; London is very exceptional. Mr. COCKRAN. How and on what basis of justification is it sought to reduce the pay of the consul general at London and Paris, at the head of such an enormous business, from $12,000 to $9,000? On what basis is that justified? What is the reason? For ex Mr. SKINNER. The scale of salaries in existing legislation is uneven. ample, we have certain consuls general at the present moment who receive more than some consuls. I myself receive a higher salary than almost all of the ministers. This bill starts with the lowest salary and works up to the top, and there is an appropriateness as between these different salaries. There is nothing to prevent you gentlemen taking that scale, which is relatively correct, and increasing it to any level you like. Mr. COCKRAN. Would not that be damaging to the general service? Are you not sacrificing to a phrase, such as regularity in scales and other expressions of that nature, the independence of these two corps? In one the work is different and vastly more important, and there ought to be a difference in pay, if you are going to compensate them for their labor to anything like the extent of its value. Mr. SKINNER. It may be hoped that under the head of post and representation allowances this thing can be equalized. It is true, certainly, that in great cities like London and Paris, demands are made upon the consul general which are much more numerous and onerous than in other cities outside the United States. It is a matter of common knowledge that London and Paris are cities in a class by themselves. The consul general in these two cities will always have varied and heavy administrative duties to perform, while at the same time they will be compelled to meet requirements of a representative kind which will make inroads on their physical and financial resources. Mr. COCKRAN. He must be of a high order of ability, the man who serves at one of these places. He should have vigilance and ability as elaborate as that of an ambassador. Mr. SKINNER. I think I should say that the consuls have not come here for increased compensation. Naturally, we should rejoice if Congress deemed it desirable in the general interest that the level of compensation be lifted up and established on relatively satisfactory lines. The immediate wish of the members of the Consular Service is, and I imagine that I am acquainted with as many of them as any man in the field, that the service shall be fully developed, that the wall I have spoken of which separates them from the diplomatic offices in which work of the same nature is carried on as that which they perform shall be broken down, that they may be relieved of the heavy anxiety which they feeel that upon separation from the service, either as a result of old age or broken health, they will be without resources other than such as they may be so fortunate as to possess privately. They deem themselves in equity to be entitled to retirement allowances, as much so as members of the Army, Navy, the judiciary, and the civil service. They are entirely willing to leave the matter of their compensation to your best judgment. Mr. COCKBAN. I am thinking of the interests of the service, and I doubt whether you can have for $9,000 the class of men that ought to be appointed to such consulates as at London and Paris. I may be all wrong about it. (Thereupon the committee adjourned to meet again at the call of the chair man.) COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS, The committee this day met, Hon. Stephen G. Porter (chairman) presiding. STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN W. DAVIS, FORMERLY AMBASSADOR TO GREAT BRITAIN, 15 BROAD STREET, NEW YORK CITY. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will be in order. Gentlemen, you will find the hearings on the American Battle Monuments Commission bill on the table. hope to take that up as soon as we get through with this foreign service bill. Mr. Davis, the committee would like very much to have your views on this bill, H. R. 12543. Mr. DAVIS. I have some embarrassment in appearing in the attitude of an expert witness here to instruct this committee, which knows a great deal more about the subject than I can pretend to, but with the background of some personal experience I do have a very deep and lively interest in this bill. That is my reason for appearing to-day. I really do not think that, so far as I know the Government service, there is any one place in it that needs this sort of reform so badly as the Diplomatic and Consular Service, the foreign service, speaking as a whole. Speaking generally, of course, the diplomatic branch of that service is the first line in the country's defense, and the Consular Service is the spearhead of the country's trade. I am quite aware of the fact, and I assume we are all aware, that the man on the street really does not appreciate the importance of either of these services. Speaking from my experience in Congress and subsequent service in the executive department and in the diplomatic corps itself, you constantly run into the most astonishing ignorance of what the service is, its importance, or what it really means. There is a prevailing impression, I know, that the diplomat's chief duty is to attend pink teas and escort dowager duchesses around at ceremonial occasions. Most people think that the consul does not come into action until somebody gets arrested in the port in which he happens to be residing. I am sure that is a quite prevalent point of view. I have read this bill, and it seems to me it presents four features which, if I may use the phrase, are cardinal points of reform in this question. Manifestly, if we are to get good men in the service and hold them, after they get there, we must set them to work under conditions which are agreeable, that will stimulate their personal ambition, and that will induce them to remain in the service after they have had the experience which makes them valuable. Over and over again, while I was in London, young men and good men in the diplomatic service would come to me in great personal concern and ask me frankly whether I thought they ought to stay in the service. I always asked them what their financial condition was. If I found that they had no or at best meager resources beyond their official salary, I told them with great regret that I thought they were doing an injustice to themselves, and that at the earliest opportunity they ought to leave the service and get into something that was not a blind alley. I did that because I felt sure that the time would come when they would want to marry, in the normal course of affairs, and would have children to take care of, and I knew they could not hope to raise a family on the salary they were receiving, and that the time would come, as it comes to all men who stay too long on salaries, when they would find it difficult to get away and would drag out the rest of their lives in discomfort to themselves and discomfort to their families. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that if we are to avoid the tremendous "labor turnover there is in the Diplomatic Service, we must do three things, first, give them an adequate living salary, a salary which will keep them in respectable comfort as long as they are in the service; second, give them a fair chance of promotion. Every man in the service ought to be like Napoleon's foot soldiers, marching with a marshal's baton in his knapsack. They can not all become heads of missions. A great many of them will not become qualified to become heads of missions. That is always true in the nature of things, and I personally believe it would be a great misfortune to the service if the heads of missions should all be taken from the so-called diplomats of career. I think it would be quite contrary to the genius of our institutions and would deprive the President of a field of selection he ought to have, that he should be unable to reach out into the general body of the citizens to make a man ambassador or minister. But there ought to be the incentive, the possibility that an ambassadorship or ministerial position is open to every man who enters the diplomatic career, if he has the necessary qualities. There ought also to be a fair chance of promotion in the lower grades, and there ought to be a sufficient number of the lower grades to give him from time to time the stimulus of an advance from one grade to another, whenever he has done some creditable piece of work or has shown a fair amount of faculty. We must do something if men are to be kept working, to stimulate their ambition. In the third place, it is not possible, it seems to me, that the Government will ever be able to pay a salary on which a man can hope to accumulate any reserve fortune. So far as I know there is no post in the whole Government that gives a man much chance to save, and probably never will be. The Government will never be able to compete with private enterprise in that respect, and that being true, if the Government excepts a man to give his life to the servicé, to take up a presumably fixed career, you must take away from him the fear of a dependent and penniless old age. You must give to these men the same prospect of retirement that you give to the Army and Navy and to the permanent civil service of the executive departments. Granted adequate pay or reasonable pay, granted a reasonable chance for promotion, as a recognition of merit, and then granted a retirement allowance which will enable a man when he is no longer useful to be assured against want, you will not only get good men but you will be able to retain them because the foreign service does offer, of course, a great many things that are attractive. It is highly intellectual labor. A man who really enjoys intellectual labor can find in the Diplomatic and Consular Service all the field that he needs. It is interesting because it is constantly taking him into new phases of work and there is a certain element of pride about it because it is a dignified position to stand among foreigners as representing a dignified and power. ful nation. This consideration will draw men to the service and will hold them there if they are given a fair chance to live the sort of life that they should live and at the same time make a provision for their old age. I read all these three things in this bill and read them with great satisfaction. There is one other thing in the bill on which I have a pretty deep personal feeling, and that is the provision for representation allowances to the diplomatic officers of the Government. Of course, that is an old subject. To those who have had any experience with it, it is rather a sore subject. It is notorious that we never have paid to our ministers, and especially to our ambassadors in the larger capitals, a salary on which it was possible for them to live, let alone to carry on the ceremonial activities that are indispensable in those positions. Those ceremonial activities, if we choose to call them that, are not mere matters of display or pride or ostentation. A certain amount of that sort of thing, as all of us here as reasonable men know, is indispensable in an exalted position of that sort. To a certain extent the country itself is judged by the style in which its representatives live abroad. Human nature being what it is, men, people, officers, and nations are judged to a large extent by appearances. It may be sometimes a false standard, yet none the less it is a standard which men employ, and the country itself must inevitably be judged to a certain extent by the appearance that its representatives present. There is another side of it that is not so often realized by the man in the street which is even more important than that. My belief is that what the diplomatic officer under present-day conditions furnishes to his Government, the most valuable thing he furnishes is a personal knowledge of the men who are controlling the activities of the nations with which his Government deals. I heard Lord Bryce say in an address delivered at Williams College, when he was over here a year ago, that since the coming in of the telegraph the functions of the ambassador and minister have become less important than in the old days when he sailed away for a six-weeks' voyage and was out of contact with his Government months at a time, and, therefore, was left solely on his own initiative and compelled to act without instructions. Now, when the telegraph wire is working every day, and he gets instructions constantly from the other end of the line, his service has become, if not less burdensome, rather less indispensable. I did rather a rash thing for a man who challenges Lord Bryce on any proposition more or less takes his life in his hands. I think he had the most encyclopaedic mind I ever met, and when it is a question of knowledge, and not of opinion, I can hardly imagine anybody challenging him on anything. But I ventured to discuss that with him and told him I thought perhaps he was mistaken about it, and that instead of a diplomatic officer having become less important and less necessary by reason of the telegraph, he had become more so, because unquestionably the existence of this rapid communication has greatly multiplied the communications between Governments, and the drawing together of the world by rapid transportation has greatly increased the number of questions which bring Governments into collision. It has made it possible, of course, for one foreign office to correspond directly with other foreign offices by telegram or by mail without the intervention of the personal equation at all. But if it must do so without having a man on the ground at the other end who can say, What sort of individual is this who is being addressed, what are his personal limitations, what are his prejudices, his views, how far can he be expected to go along this line or on that, the foreign secretary is like a man with a blindfold over his eyes, simply talking into the air. The function of the diplomatic officer nowadays is to let his Government know who the man is at the other end of the wire and what sort of influences are working on him that will make him amenable to this suggestion or make him disposed to refuse that. A diplomatic officer of to-day who is receiving by wire corresponding for transmittal to the Government to which he is accredited, even where it comes as it frequently does in the shape of a formal note, prepared in the State Department, must feel it his duty to examine that note in the light of his acquaintanceship with the men on the ground. If he finds anything in it which his knowledge convinces him is inexpedient, it is his duty to advise his Government that in that respect the note ought to be corrected to meet the particular situation. We can no more get along without that sort of personal contact than a business man can sell his goods by mail without drummers, who know his individual customers, their tastes, and how far they can be accommodated. That is more or less of a digression. I do not want to take up too much of your time. The CHAIRMAN. Go ahead. Mr. DAVIS. The bearing of that on this question of expense is that you can not get an acquaintance with human beings unless you associate with them. You have got to get acquainted in that particular circle. You have got to get upon terms of social intimacy, as far as opportunity permits, with men who are responsible for the governmental policy, and that, of course, necessarily involves the interchange of those courtesies that go to make up human intercourse. That means expense. It is the same sort of expense account that the manufacturer has for his salesmen when he sends them out and gives them a salary, plus expense account, to be spent in cultivating the good will of their customers. If I had my way about it, a perfectly free hand, I say to you frankly I would not raise the salary of an ambassador, possibly not of a minister, in the Government service; not because I do not think they earn their salaries. A man in any of these positions who is of any account at all earns his salary many times over in his service to the Government. They are not sinecures; they are really very hard-working posts. But you can not raise those salaries, as it seems to me, without getting them out of disproportion to the other salaries that are paid in the governmenal establishment. While you pay your Chief Justice $16,500 and Cabinet officers $12,000, and so on down the line, I do not think that in due proportion you can raise the salaries of your ambassadors and ministers, but you can do what every other Government does, and give them what the French call frais de representation, expense of representation, which will cover these necessary expenses, which they must undertake, which they must assume, if they are to become really useful to the Government in their positions. I think there ought to be and I am glad this bill takes it up in that form-that there ought to be a lump appropriation given to the Secretary of State to be disposed of by him in his discretion, and, of course, with accountability to Congress and to the Treasury, in allotting to the different diplomatic posts such expenses of representation as would fairly enable them to meet these indispensable expenditures, which are not in their nature a private, but which are really incurred for the benefit primarily of the Government they represent. I do not know whether the committee would be interested and whether it would help them for me to go into my personal experience on that subject. Mr. COOPER. I would like to hear it. Mr. DAVIS. Having been through the mill I know something about it. Mr. DAVIS. No man likes to talk about his private or personal affairs, but you will forgive my doing that because of the facts I have to offer about the conditions. I went to London at a salary of $17,500. The State Department had been given the right during the war to make an allowance of $5,000 a year for the purpose of entertaining American officers who were abroad, recognizing that two or three million Americans were coming over there, all of whom had the idea that the ambassador's house was theirs, and that he certainly would have some additional expense, so it allowed $5,000 for that purpose. At the end of my first year, that allowance was revoked and after some more or less earnest protest on my part, I think they made it $3,000 the second year. That was all. I am quite sure that my establishment in London was more modest than that of any other ambassador there. My house was not large; my whole establishment was the most modest. I did not do a great deal of entertaining. I only did the entertaining which was indispensable to return the courtesies which I officially received. Of course, you can not always take and never give. You must entertain the officials of the Government who entertain you to be recognized as on a friendly footing with them. I paid as rent for my own house $8,000 in round figures—that is, paid 1,500 pounds sterling, plus rates and taxes, which are the real estate rents on it; which it cost me every year I was there, roughly. There was also a very low rate of exchange which I had in my favor the whole time, the low rate of exchange on the pound sterling, which went once as low as $3.30 and ran from that to $4.10, and up and down. Living as I was, without any ostentation— it was not a time for ostentation, and had I been a multimillionaire I would not at that particular time, under the circumstances, have indulged in the slightest ostentation whatever; the British people were just coming out of the war, were all distressed, still had the wounds on their persons and were bowed down with financial difficulty, and any man who would have made a display at that time would have made himself unpopular; it was eminently a time for conservatism and quietude-but with all that, living as I was, counting the expenses of myself and family, which is small, it cost me, roughly, three times my salary every year I was there, between fifty thousand and sixty thousand dollars. I do not believe that anybody could possibly have done it, done it decently,with any less expenditure than that. Now, of course, that is not fair. There is another thing which I think the public rarely realizes, not only do they send a man abroad under circumstances that compel him to make those expenditures as to which he has no choice and as to which it is not a question of saying, "I will or will not;" it is a question of "must." They forget also that they send him abroad under circumstances which forbid him to economize even in the expenditures which he makes. I do not know how it is now in Washington, but I know how it was when I was in Congress 10 years ago. There was a definite scale of charges in Washington for Congressmen and there |