This book is not a work of diplomatic history in the traditional sense. It is not concerned with charting the course of past bilateral relations with any particular foreign country; nor does it seek to reconstruct decision-making during a particular diplomatic crisis. Rather, it aims to examine the underlying principles and the élite perceptions that shaped British foreign policy during the second half of the long nineteenth century. Whether or not one agrees with Balzac that bureaucracy is a vast apparatus operated by pygmies, bureaucracy matters in the life of nations. This includes the field of international history, too. Even so, it is individual people, be they pygmies or giants, who make institutions work. Without understanding them, what ‘made them tick’, and how they acted together as a group, no real understanding of the past is possible. But this book goes beyond individuals. It attempts to reconstruct the collective mindset of professional diplomats as part of the political, social and intellectual fabric of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, their esprit de corps – that peculiarly, quintessentially perhaps, English trait, for which, perhaps typically, the English language has yet to find an appropriate word.