To Alvey Augustus Adee, Esquire,

The Second Assistant Secretary of State.

My dear Mr. Adee,

Long years of delightful association as one of your subordinates in the State Department taught me to know how much the Department owes to you. You have given your life to its service. You have brought to that service diversified scholarship, peculiar aptitude, unselfish loyalty and a gentleman's sense of honor. You have guided our foreign relations through a hundred storms. The best traditions of the Department are personified in you. I beg you to accept this history, because there is no one else to whom it can so appropriately be dedicated, and because I wish to give myself the gratification of once more subscribing myself

Washington, April 6, 1914.

Your friend,

GAILLARD HUNT.

293537

IN

PREFACE

This

N 1893 I prepared, as a part of the exhibit of the Department of State at the World's Fair at Chicago, an historical sketch of the Department, which it subsequently reprinted for its use. sketch furnished the basis of two briefer pamphlets on the same subject, one for the Exhibition at Omaha in 1898 and the other for the Buffalo Exhibition in 1901. Beginning in October, 1907, and running until October, 1912, the American Journal of International Law printed the completer study of the Department which, with some rearrangement and additions, constitutes this volume. Remarkable to say, it is the only historical study of one of the Executive Departments that has thus far appeared.

My object has been to show the formation and development of the Department of State and what its chief duties are and have been. I have written no diplomatic history of the United States, or biographical sketches of the Secretaries of State. My concern. has been with the machine of which the foreign service is a part and whose movements the Secretary of State directs.

There are many long citations from laws, circulars, and regulations here; but they tell the story more accurately than a paraphrase could do, and I wish to make this book definitive, as far as it goes. The

authorities which I have used are indicated in the notes; but the most important facts in the book are those which I found in the records from time to time during my many years of service in the Department, or learned personally from my colleagues, whom I like to think of as my friends.

G. H.