The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-04-12
An Infant Terrible.

No doubt imperial government in the
 United States would be much less dan
 gerous if Poultney Bigelow or his friend
 the German Kaiser was placed in au-
 thority and our affairs were managed
 with real intelligence. Unfortunately We have never been able to obtain for
 a governor anybody who is an excep- tion to Jowetts rule that mo one, not
 even the youngest of us, is infallible,"
 and so we blunder on in ways that of l ten call forth the rebukes of Poultney
 Both our land and naval operations In
 the Spanish war were the work of anna
 teur bunglers, judged by the trained
 military eye of Poultney The Taft commission in the Philippines is a half
 baked sort of an affair which doesn't
 even refer in its reports to important
 problems which Poultney has foreseen
 and worked out. Taking rapid but
 masterly glances in every direction. Poultney can set Us right as fast and
 as infallibly as we, unaided, will sure- Fly go wrong. A few days ago at Yale he cut wide swath in the rich meadow
 of our mistakes by an address on Col onial Administration" and, pausing for breath with a now as to our consuls" he proceeded, just incidentally as a re- lief in the midst of more serious ef- forts, to apply his impossible powers to illuminating the errors of our con- sular service. From him we learn that American consuls are mostly drunkards, embezzlers or incompetents,
 and that throughout the world to-day A Ic
 sul an obstacle, unless he is a dishonest
 merchant, and he finds the consul in his
 position for the purpose of getting more
 out of it than his salary would indi- cate"
 Now, this is a pretty serious situa- tion and we should not have believed it if anybody older and less sure of himself than Poultney had said it. Even as it Is, we fear that modesty has led Poultney to limit overmuch his concession that we have had a few good consuls, mostly literary men, like Bret Hart and w. D. Howells and | Washington Irving He would proba- ply on second or perhaps on first, | thought except from his sweeping con- demnation the Hon. John Bgelow, who | was United States Consul in Paris un- | til President Lincoln promoted him | from that post to be Minister to France. Perhaps he would also except MT. John | G. Nicolay, who succeeded Mir Bge- | low. What would he gay, though, of | making spells of the Paris consulship 1 to furnish a place for a retiring private | secretary? Something might be said | for MT. George Walker, the banker and | president, who after perform ing confidential foreign financial mis- l sions was also consul in Paris; and for Major J. l.. Rathhone q West Point | and for MT. Frank Mason, who long adorned consular posts in Europe. Possibly, coming down even to our own degenerate, he might think that MT. Herbert Bowen was credita- ble consul until he was promoted and sent to Persia as minister and regard with favor men like MT. Dickinson at Constantinople, MT. Osborne at Lon don, MT Sprague, who has served at ! Gibraltar since 1S4S, and MT. Hay. re- gently at Pretoria; though, speaking of the latter post Poultney does say: "In south Africa we have practically no consul. Bryant Lindley told me that luIllS IiS Ihdiy JCeio .iVic iiS icFCl knew an American consul to keep sober after o'clock, and it was the usual hing for the English consul to close ID the days work of our incompetent official"
 No doubt the American consular ser ,ice could be improved. Greater care $ needed to select men equipped to transact business in foreign countries. But with all it's shortcomings the ser- yice is the envy of European manufac- urers and merchants. Even in Eng