3
Very important Ministers are the six Secretaries of State. For a century before 1782 there were two joint Secretaries of State. One had the management of affairs relating to the northern States of Europe; the other dealt with matters affecting the southern countries of the Continent, and Home affairs, which included Ireland and the Colonies. In 1782 there was a redistribution of their duties, and each got a distinctive title. The former was called “Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,”[3] and was given control of the relations of the Kingdom with all foreign States; and the latter was styled “Secretary of State for the Home Department,” which included Great Britain, Ireland, and the Colonies. There was also at this time a Minister called “Secretary at War,” responsible for the land forces of the Crown, who, by a singular arrangement, was a subordinate of the Home Office. In 1794 the Secretary of State for War was created; and in 1801 the affairs of the Colonies were by another strange arrangement transferred to him from the Home Department. But in 1854, on the outbreak of the Crimean War, the War Minister was relieved of all Colonial business, which was vested in a new Secretary of State for the Colonies. In 1858, after the Indian Mutiny, when the authority and power of the East India Company were taken over by the Imperial Government, the Secretary of State for India was first appointed. The office of Secretary of State for Air which, as I have already said, was created in 1917, during the Great War, is held conjointly with the Secretaryship for War. The Air Minister, as President of the Air Council, is responsible for the administration of the Air Force and the defence of the realm by air. The salary of a Secretary of State is £5,000 per annum. Each is assisted in the work of his department by an Under-Secretary of State, who is paid £1,500. The War Office has an additional parliamentary official known as the Financial Secretary, who also receives £1,500. In 1919 a new Under-Secretaryship was attached to the Foreign Office, called “Secretary of the Overseas Trade Department” (it has relations with the Board of Trade also), with a salary of £1,500 a year. The First Lord of the Admiralty is paid £4,500 a year for directing the affairs of the Navy. He, like the Secretary of State for War, has two subordinates in Parliament—the Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, concerned chiefly with the men and the pay and conditions of service, who gets £2,000, and the Civil Lord of the Admiralty, responsible for harbour works and docks, who gets £1,000 a year.
The Administration includes three offices of high standing, having little if any departmental duties, but carrying salaries of £2,000 each, which are usually given to elderly men of long service, so that the Cabinet might have the advantage of their ripe experience and sage councils. The first in dignity is the Lord President of the Council. He presides at the meetings of the Privy Council; but practically the only occasion on which all its members are summoned is at the demise of the Crown, when it becomes the duty of that ancient body to meet for the purpose of proclaiming the accession of the new Sovereign. Formerly the Lord President was the chairman of certain committees of the Privy Council, which no longer exist. In 1837, when Lord John Russell took the first step to establish a system of national education, a Committee of the Privy Council was appointed to administer the moneys which Parliament voted for the purpose, and at its deliberations the Lord President presided. In 1855 a new office was created—that of Vice-President of the Council—which in time became vested with the control of education, and that, too, disappeared when the Board of Education, with a Minister at its head, was created in 1902. In like manner, the duties of the Privy Council in regard to trade were transferred to the Board of Trade, and its duties in regard to public health were transferred to the Local Government Board. Again, the Lord President supervised the exercise of the statutory powers of the Privy Council in connection with the prevention of cattle disease; but the creation of a Board of Agriculture took that work out of his hands and left him without any business, save that of the nominal supervision of the administrative functions of the Privy Council. The office of Lord Privy Seal is a survival from the historic past when the Privy Council sought to restrain executive acts of the Crown by insisting that the Lord Chancellor should not affix the imprimatur of the Great Seal to any grant, or patent, or writ which the Sovereign desired to issue, without their authorization in the form of a warrant under the Privy Seal. In these days of Government by Parliament, the Lord Privy Seal has nothing to do. Another office of dignity rather than of responsibility is that of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. His duties in relation to the revenues of the Duchy, which are vested in the Sovereign and exempt from parliamentary control are purely nominal, so that he is free to come to the assistance of any Minister when hard pressed in Parliament, or by departmental work outside. “So far from resembling an epicurean divinity,” said Lord Dufferin in 1871, when some noble lords called his position a sinecure, “the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster seems to me to be a kind of charwoman and maid-of-all-work to the Government.”