While our service, therefore, is more than self-supporting, that of our British cousins, maintained at a gross expenditure one half larger than ours, requires an outgo from the exchequer equal to about $600,000 annually.

The British government also maintains a most comprehensive system of retiring pensions and superannuation allowances, under which not less than £17,000 annually is paid to rather more than fifty members of the consular service who have ceased to do any work.

Our survey of the consular system of the United States would be incomplete if we omitted to mention several matters which are either peculiar to certain consulates, or relate remotely, if at all, to strictly consular duties. We shall review them as briefly as possible.

The law authorizes the appointment by the President of eight interpreters, to be attached to consulates in China, Japan, and Siam, and also one at Hong Kong, which is a post in the British dominions. For four of these, salaries at the rate of $2,000 each are allowed, and for four others salaries at the rate of $750 each,- a rather wide difference. Besides this provision for interpreters appointed by the President, the law authorizes an allowance not exceeding $500 each for the compensation of interpreters at twelve other consulates in the same countries, and $500 each for "interpreters, guards, and other expenses" at six consulates in the Turkish dominions, namely, Constantinople, Smyrna, Cairo in Egypt, Beirut and Jerusalem in Syria, and Candia.

The law also, as we read it, authorizes the appointment of seven marshals for consular courts, four in China, one in Japan, one in Turkey, and one in Siam; the last, by an express provision of law, to receive no salary: it is perhaps needless

* This is the latest year for which the return is included in the most recent issue of the "British Foreign Office List," that for January, 1876.

to add that the position is vacant. The authorized compensation for the other marshals is $1,000 each, together with the official fees received. The annual appropriation, including loss by exchange, has recently been $7,700; and we believe there are as many as four, besides a so-called vacancy in China, and two in Japan, in addition to the one in Turkey, at Constantinople. These officers are necessary, but they are needed at every consulate in the countries named, as well as at those specially designated in the law. If the allowance for "interpreters, guards, etc.," at certain consulates in the Turkish dominions, were enlarged and multiplied so as to cover all the more important consulates in China, Japan, Turkey, and Siam, the marshals might perhaps be dispensed with, without materially increasing the cost to the government.

The provisions of law last mentioned add fifteen to the number of persons belonging or attached to the consular service, holding appointments from the President or Secretary of State, making our total for the personnel (exclusive of the ministers resident and consuls-general to Hayti and Liberia) eight hundred and fifty-four, divided as follows:

We proceed to mention a few other matters, the expense of which does not appear to belong to the cost of the consular establishment proper, although they are necessarily provided for at the charge of the government. For rent of prisons and wages of the keepers, in the Oriental countries already mentioned in speaking of the interpreters and marshals, Congress annually appropriates various sums, amounting this year to $ 21,250, besides $5,000 for a court-house and jail at Yedo in Japan. For bringing home persons charged with crime, the usual appropriation has been $ 5,000. For the relief of distressed seamen, $100,000 is appropriated for the present year; the amount actually expended each year fluctuates with the number of marine disasters, and is always partially covered by the extra wages collected by consuls and remitted by them to the treasury. "To enable the President to acknowledge the services of masters and crews of foreign vessels in rescuing American citizens from shipwreck," $ 5,000 is appropriated this year, the same amount which has been usual heretofore. This is a piece of inexpensive international courtesy which the most rabid reformer in the pretended interest of economy should not wish to disturb. The acknowledgment is made, as occasions arise, in the form of the present of a chronometer, watch, or some other article useful to seamen, or a sum of money, sometimes, to be divided among several engaged together in the deed of humanity; the expenditures fall well within the appropriation, and a similar acknowledgment on the part of foreign governments is usual when American sailors rescue their subjects from shipwreck.

Besides proposing to amend existing laws to reduce the salaries of many consuls, as already mentioned, the bill of the House of Representatives proposes for the next financial year to reduce the allowances for the clerk hire of consuls from an aggregate of $51,000 to $42,600, and similar reductions in other appropriations, including some of those last mentioned, the most considerable apparent saving being in that for the relief of distressed seamen, which would be cut down from $100,000 to $60,000. It is sufficient to say of these proposals, that such of them as would actually take effect could only result in impairing the efficiency of the service, by contracting

sums already pitifully scant; and securing an addition to the revenue derived from fees levied upon commerce by the doubtful means of diminishing the services for which the fees are exacted as an equivalent.

For allowance to widows or heirs of deceased diplomatic as well as consular officers" for the time that would necessarily be occupied in making the transit from the post of duty of the deceased to his residence in the United States," five thousand dollars is this year's appropriation, of which the smaller part attaches to the consular service, as the allowance is made at the rate of the salary. The reader will perhaps be surprised to learn that this provision for widows, certainly not overgenerous, is as recent as an act passed February 22, 1873. Before that date, when a minister or consul died abroad, whether alone or surrounded by his family, the accounting officer calculated his salary exactly to the day of his death, and the government paid no more.

This enumeration exhausts the list of government expenditures for objects connected with the consular service, if we except the appropriation for "necessary expenses attendant upon the execution of the Neutrality Act," which we mention, although it belongs rather to the diplomatic service than to the consular, if to either; being available, and used, no doubt, quite as frequently to cover objects of domestic as of foreign expenditure. We mention it because it explains the only appropriation to which the name of "secret-service fund" can with the slightest propriety attach, and it may be interesting to our readers to see just how much "secrecy " it implies, and how this is effected. The limitation in the law is thus expressed :

"To be expended under the direction of the President, pursuant to the third section of the act of Congress of May 1, 1810, entitled 'An Act fixing the compensation of ministers and consuls residing on the coast of Barbary, and for other purposes.'

Observe how scrupulously we adhere to the ways of the fathers. The act of May 1, 1810, was passed when the Republic had scarcely attained its majority, if that comes to republics at the age of twenty-one years. The act has long since become inoperative for any purpose save to serve for this reference in

the annual appropriation, and indeed, for that or any other purpose, it has now been absorbed in the Revised Statutes, although, oddly enough, its substance there appears under the citation of a different act. But we will quote it as it was enacted sixty-five years ago, when the whole expenditures of the government scarcely exceeded $13,000,000, and that part of them affected by this act must have fallen short of $100,000.

In the first place, the carelessness of engrossing clerks, one after another, has done injustice to the title of the act. It does not relate merely to "ministers and consuls on the coast of Barbary," but it is entitled "an act fixing the compensation of public ministers, and of consuls residing on the coast of Barbary, and for other purposes"; it covered the whole diplomatic establishment of the infant Republic as it then existed, and the consular establishment so far as we had any, and it repealed two previous acts upon the same general subject. Its principal purpose was to define and limit salaries, the maximum for a minister plenipotentiary being fixed at $9,000; for a chargé des affaires, $4,500; for a secretary of legation, $2,000; for a consul to reside at Algiers, $4,000; for a consul to reside at any other of the states on the coast of Barbary, $2,000; not more than one consul to be appointed for any one of these states. It allowed not exceeding "one year's full salary" to be paid to a minister plenipotentiary or chargé des affaires as outfit,-a provision of law that was maintained until 1855; but at the same time carefully provided that " no consul shall be allowed an outfit in any case whatever, any usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding." By the second section, provision was made to prevent the payment of these or any salaries to any person not duly appointed; this part of the act, which has no doubt always been in force, and is incorporated in the Revised Statutes, has not always, we fear, been strictly observed. Next followed the third section, to which the appropriation refers, in these words:

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"SECTION 3. And be it further enacted, That where any sum or sums of money shall be drawn from the treasury, under any law making appropriation for the contingent expenses of intercourse between the United States and foreign nations, the President shall be,