First, that it would not be always desirable for Ministers to state clearly the motives which induced them to agree to foreign compacts.  “Treaties,” it is said, “are in one great respect different from laws, they concern not only the Government which binds, the nation so bound, but a third party too—­a foreign country—­and the feelings of that country are to be considered as well as our own.  And that foreign country will, probably, in the present state of the world be a despotic one, where discussion is not practised, where it is not understood, where the expressions of different speakers are not accurately weighed, where undue offence may easily be given.”  This objection might be easily avoided by requiring that the discussion upon treaties in Parliament like that discussion in the American Senate should be “in secret session,” and that no report should be published of it.  But I should, for my own part, be rather disposed to risk a public debate.  Despotic nations now cannot understand England; it is to them an anomaly “chartered by Providence”; they have been time out of mind puzzled by its institutions, vexed at its statesmen, and angry at its newspapers.  A little more of such perplexity and such vexation does not seem to me a great evil.  And if it be meant, as it often is meant, that the whole truth as to treaties cannot be spoken out, I answer, that neither can the whole truth as to laws.  All important laws affect large “vested 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.