--I find in this morning's papers the statement that
the Government of the United States has paid to the two members of the
Peace Commission entitled to receive money for their services 100,000
dollars each for their six weeks' work in Paris.

I hope that this is true. I will allow myself the satisfaction of
considering that it is true, and of treating it as a thing finished and
settled.

It is a precedent; and ought to be a welcome one to our country. A
precedent always has a chance to be valuable (as well as the other way);
and its best chance to be valuable (or the other way) is when it takes
such a striking form as to fix a whole nation's attention upon it. If it
come justified out of the discussion which will follow, it will find a
career ready and waiting for it.

We realise that the edifice of public justice is built of precedents,
from the ground upward; but we do not always realise that all the
other details of our civilisation are likewise built of precedents.
The changes also which they undergo are due to the intrusion of new
precedents, which hold their ground against opposition, and keep their
place. A precedent may die at birth, or it may live--it is mainly a
matter of luck. If it be imitated once, it has a chance; if twice a
better chance; if three times it is reaching a point where account must
be taken of it; if four, five, or six times, it has probably come to
stay--for a whole century, possibly. If a town start a new bow, or a new
dance, or a new temperance project, or a new kind of hat, and can get
the precedent adopted in the next town, the career of that precedent is
begun; and it will be unsafe to bet as to where the end of its journey
is going to be. It may not get this start at all, and may have no
career; but, if a crown prince introduce the precedent, it will attract
vast attention, and its chances for a career are so great as to amount
almost to a certainty.

For a long time we have been reaping damage from a couple of disastrous
precedents. One is the precedent of shabby pay to public servants
standing for the power and dignity of the Republic in foreign lands; the
other is a precedent condemning them to exhibit themselves officially
in clothes which are not only without grace or dignity, but are a pretty
loud and pious rebuke to the vain and frivolous costumes worn by the
other officials. To our day an American ambassador's official costume
remains under the reproach of these defects. A