the British Crown abroad have been mulcted
in that ratio out of their salaries. Those who
have resisted the exaction do not, somehow, get
on in the service. The Foreign Office agents
levy a toll upon almost every shilling spent by
the nation for the maintenance of the dignity
of the British crown in foreign countries.
It has been publicly stated in the Morning
Post, and it has not been denied, that the right
to levy these tolls was transferred from one
clerk to another by a regular business circular
sent round to his customers. This was not
done by a few underpaid juniors requiring to
eke out a slender salary to support their families.
It was done by the chief men in the office,
whom it was professional ruin to any member
of the diplomatic and consular services to
disobey or to offend. The last known transaction
of the kind was the disposal of the large banking
and agency business of the assistant under-
secretary to one of the senior clerks. This
business consists chiefly in receiving and
transmitting the salaries of officers in the service
who are employed abroad, and turns the modest
salaries of those who profit by it from hundreds
into thousands.

The Political Under-Secretary being always a
new man, knowing nothing of " the office"
routine, and the Permanent Under-Secretary being
chiefly occupied at the Privy Council, we are
informed by the Foreign Office List that the
Assistant Under-Secretary superintends all
"correspondence with her Majesty's ministers and
consuls abroad (except in China, Japan, and
Siam); with the representatives of foreign
powers in England, the Board of Trade, and
other departments of her Majesty's government,
as well as with commercial associations,
&c., on matters strictly commercial;
correspondence with her Majesty's consuls-general
and consuls in all parts of the world, and
management of all matters relating to the consular
service; domestic arrangements and 'financial
business of the office' (including, it is
presumed, the agency and banking trade) at home
and abroad; foreign ministers' privileges;
preparation of consular commissions and
exequeators, and issue of passports; correspondence
on all matters relating to the suppression
of the slave-trade; Austria, Bavaria,
Belgium, Denmark, Hanse Towns, Netherlands,
Prussia, Sweden, Wurtemberg;
custody and registry of the MS. correspondence,
treaties and printed books; preparation of
memoranda on historical events; international
cases; treaty questions, &c.; compilation of
British and foreign state papers (including, of
course, the Abyssinian garbled blue-books);
correspondence on matters relating to the
Public Record Office; and, once more again,
treaties, full powers, commissions, other than
consular credentials, royal letters, British and
foreign orders, medals and honorary rewards,
questions of ceremonial and precedence."

We are not responsible for the arrangement,
grammar, or anything else about this document,
We quote it as it stands in page 9 of the
Foreign Office List. We learn from it what are
a few of the duties of this gentleman, who has
never during his whole life put his foot, officially,
on any foreign soil. We learn also by what
means and by whom the Abyssinian blue-books
were prepared, and the Queen's letter
suppressed without the knowledge of the Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs (as openly stated
in parliament), just in the same manner as the
private agency had been transferred without
the knowledge of Lord Malmesbury; and we
know how and by whom we are taxed one
penny on our present incomes, with a near
prospect of twopence.

Another permanent official, who has only been
abroad for a few months in the early part of the
reign of William the Fourth, in 1831-2, and
never since, but for the luckless trip with Lord
Russell to Vienna in 1855, has his share of
work; for he is ostentatiously declared to
superintend in person, without even the convenient
fiction of a lay figure in the shape of a
perfectly unconscious political colleague, all the
affairs with this country of the " Argentine
Confederation, Bolivia, Brazils, Central America,
Chili, Columbia, Equator, Haiti, Mexico,
Peru, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay, Venezuela;"
France, Italy, Madagascar (exquisite harmony
of thought!), Switzerland, and miscellaneous!
Barbary States, Egypt, Greece, Persia, Russia,
and Turkey, China, Japan, Siam, and United
States."*

* Foreign Office List, page 9.

The bondholders of the Central American
states will be glad to understand clearly the
extent of their obligations to this gentleman;
and parliament will be glad to learn what it
owes to his colleague; for, as Lord Stanley
and Mr. Layard have both denied that they
could control the affairs of " the office," it is
clear that everything must be in the hands of
these gentlemen, and the permanent
subordinates.

It would be well for England if these
gentlemen were content even with the power
of declaring war and adding to the income-
tax; but, unhappily for our trade, they have
authorised the wildest system of commercial
taxes and taxes on shipping ever devised. It
appears from the Consular Fee Table in the
Foreign Office List that no less than thirty-nine
fees, and endless subdivisions and repetitions
of those fees under other names, may be
levied upon every British vessel which trades
beyond the seas to any foreign port whatever.
No British sailor, from the skipper to
the cabin-boy, is exempt from them. A sick
man may be fined for going to hospital, fined
on coming out again, fined for complaining of
putrid food, fined if summoned before a judge
who cannot understand a word he says, fined
for being sent to prison unjustly, fined for
coming out again, put in irons without a hearing
upon a charge quite unintelligible, fined
when discharged from his employment, fined
when shipped again.