5
Gladstone agreed with Peel that it was not advisable to put a man into the Cabinet without a previous official training. It was also Gladstone’s custom, once he had invited a man to office, to hold on to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to admitting a man into the Cabinet,” said he, mentioning one of the principles which guided him in the making of a Government, “is to leave a man out who has once been in.” Still, there were occasions when he was compelled to pass over an old comrade-in-arms on the ground of age. He was himself seventy-one years of age when, in 1880, he was called upon to form his second Government. To one old member of his former Administration he wrote: “I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of office.” He admitted that he himself was “the oldest man of his political generation,” and that, therefore, he should be a solecism in the Government which he was engaged in constructing. “I have been brought,” he added, “by the seeming force of exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of the other.” Here we have the answer to the question of age and office. The exclusion of a veteran politician from office is not a matter of the number of years he has counted. Is he an extinct political volcano as well as an old man? May he safely be set aside? On the answer which the Prime Minister gives to these questions in his own mind depends the fate of the office-seeker of advanced years. Gladstone was eighty-four in 1893, but he was still inevitable as Prime Minister. If the strong young man of achievement, and still greater promise, cannot be ignored, neither can the old man, who, having built up a commanding reputation, takes care that it is duly and fittingly recognized.
It is a singular thing that, among the twelve hundred men or so who constitute the two Houses of Parliament, there has never been any reluctance to take office. Probably the only instance of a public man who had a positive repugnance of office was Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in the Grey and Melbourne Administrations from November 1830 to December 1834. Office destroyed all his happiness, he declared, and so affected his mind that he had to remove his pistols from his bedroom lest he should be tempted to shoot himself. He remained in office because he felt that one in his rank and position—born, as it were, to the purple, a member of one of the great territorial families, who boast of long lines of ancestors in the public service—could no more set aside the responsibility of office than the earldom and broad acres of which he was also the heir. The one consolation he derived from the death of his brother, Earl Spencer, was that his own accession to the House of Lords compelled him to lay down the burden of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir George Cornewall Lewis seems to have been animated by somewhat the same uncommonly high sense of duty. When Palmerston, in the forming of his Administration in 1855, offered him the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer which Gladstone had vacated, he says he entertained the strongest disinclination to accept the office. “I felt, however,” he writes, “that in the peculiar position of the Government”—they were in difficulties over the Crimean War—“refusal was scarcely honourable, and would be attributable to cowardice, and I therefore, most reluctantly, made up my mind to accept it.”
But these cases of objection to office on the part of public men, however wealthy or however old, are exceedingly rare. The hunt for posts when a new Government is being formed after a dissolution is eager and untiring. The old men, who will not admit that their weight of years unfits them for the cares of office, haunt the political clubs and Downing Street, so as to keep themselves conspicuous in the eyes of the new Prime Minister. But they cannot all get “jobs,” to use a word commonly employed while a Government is being made. Some of them must be sacrificed; there are so many able and pushful young men to be provided for. The same cry is heard in politics as in other walks of life: “Why should these old fellows lag superfluous on the stage?” But “the old gang”—as they are called by the young—will not retire from public life voluntarily and gracefully. It is not alone that they instinctively revolt against the assumption that their capacity for work is at an end, but they also dislike change of habits and pursuits, and, above all, they desire for a little longer to play a leading part on the prominent stage of Parliament. Public life, therefore, retires from them. It is only the few who have made a great reputation and acquired a great authority that cannot lightly be set aside. For most politicians, no matter how fine their services in the past, a time comes when they are designated “old fogeys,” and, while still anxious to be once more Ministers of the Crown, they experience the humiliation, as they look upon it, of being shunted for ever. It is idle to talk of acquiescing patiently in the inevitable. Political history affords many a sad instance of such a fate being regarded as one of the sorest of the injustices of life.
The young and pushful have their disappointments and vexations also. Disraeli—according to Buckle, his biographer—having completed his Administration in 1874, wrote to a lady friend: “I have contrived in the minor and working places to include every representative man, that is to say, everyone who might be troublesome—all those sort of men who would have made a Tory cave.” He adds: “There are some terrible disappointments, but I have written soothing letters, which, on the whole, have not been without success.” But not altogether. For in another letter, written in 1876, Disraeli says that at a dinner party he met Lord Randolph Churchill—“he glaring like one possessed of a devil, and quite uncivil when I addressed him rather cordially.” “Why?” he asks, and answering, he says it was perhaps that “I gave the lordship of the Treasury to Crichton instead of himself.”
The making of a Government may be completed in a week if all goes well. Should there be difficulties in reconciling the claims of influential rivals for particular offices, it may extend over a fortnight. And what does it all signify to the people or nation? Charles Dickens was disposed to take an ironic view of the matter, if we judge from some passages in Bleak House. “The limited choice of the Crown,” he writes, “in the formation of a new Ministry would lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case, in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the Leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? You can’t offer the Presidency of the Council. That is reserved for Poodle. You can’t put him in the Woods and Forests. That is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces because you can’t provide for Noodle!” That, however, does not quite settle the matter. May it not be said, rather—Happy country which has so many able and honest men striving for the opportunity of toiling in its service!