Many of them are poor men, without private means, who have
voluntarily abandoned high professional ambitions and turned their backs
on the rewards of business to serve their country on salaries that are
not merely inadequate, but indecently so. There is not one of them
who is not constantly assailed by offers of positions in the world
of commerce, finance, and the law that would satisfy every material
ambition with which he began life. There is not one of them who could
not, if he chose, earn outside Washington from ten to twenty times the
income on which he economizes as a State official. But these men are
as indifferent to money and to the power that money brings as to the
allurements of Newport and New York, or to merely personal distinctions,
or to the commercialized ideals which the great bulk of their
fellow-countrymen accept without question. They are content, and more
than content, to sink themselves in the National service without a
thought of private advancement, and often at a heavy sacrifice of
worldly honors, and to toil on . . . sustained by their own native
impulse to make of patriotism an efficient instrument of public
betterment."
The American public rarely appreciate the high quality of the work
done by some of our diplomats--work, usually entirely unnoticed and
unrewarded, which redounds to the interest and the honor of all of
us.
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