The Government of England (Vol. I)

by A. Lawrence Lowell

Offices in the Cabinet.

Certain offices always bring their holders into the cabinet. These are the positions of First Lord of the Treasury (a post almost invariably held either by the Prime Minister himself, or by the leader of the House of Commons if the Prime Minister is a peer and takes some other office); Lord Chancellor (a great political as well as judicial office); the great English executive offices, those of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the five Secretaries of State, and the First Lord of the Admiralty; and a couple of dignified positions without active administrative duties, those of President of the Council and the Lord Privy Seal. Certain other officers have been of late years always in the cabinet; such are the Presidents of the Board of Trade, the Local Government Board, and the Board of Education, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland,—except when his nominal superior, the Lord Lieutenant for Ireland, is himself a member. On the other hand, the Secretary for Scotland and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster are usually in the cabinet; while the President of the Board of Agriculture and the Postmaster-General are often there; the First Commissioner of Works and the Lord Chancellor for Ireland occasionally so. The tendency at the present day is certainly in the direction of including the head of every considerable branch of the administration.

The counsel of a statesman who was incapacitated for the performance of steady administrative work, or unwilling to undertake it, was occasionally secured in former times by giving him a seat in the cabinet without any office under the Crown. He then became what is known on the continent as a minister without portfolio. The last case of this kind in England was that of Lord John Russell in 1854-1856; but the same object is practically attained to-day by means of the office of Lord Privy Seal,[60:1] which involves no real administrative duties, and those of President of the Council,[60:2] and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, where the duties are very light.

The Ministers must have Seats in Parliament.

As the continental practice whereby ministers are allowed to address the legislature, whether they have seats in it or not, is unknown in England, every member of the cabinet, and indeed of the ministry, must have a seat in one or other House of Parliament;[61:1] the last exception being that of Mr. Gladstone, who held the office of Secretary of State for the Colonies during the last few months of Sir Robert Peel's administration in 1846, although he had failed of reëlection to the House of Commons.[61:2] The reason commonly given for such a limitation in the selection of ministers is that otherwise they could not be made responsible to Parliament, where they must be present in order to answer questions, and give information relating to their departments. From the standpoint of Parliament this is perfectly true, but the converse is also true. The head of a department sits in the House of Commons quite as much in order to control the House, as in order that the House may control him. In his chapter on "Changes of Ministry," Bagehot has shown how defenceless against attack any department is sure to be without a spokesman in Parliament, and he cites as a forcible illustration the fate of the first Poor Law Commission.[61:3] All this applies, of course, only to the House of Commons, for although the presence of ministers in the House of Lords is a convenience in debate, and an appropriate recognition of the legal equality of the two chambers, there is no responsibility to be secured thereby, and it is not the essential means of controlling the action of the peers.

The Cabinet System and Administrative Efficiency.

The men who win places in the ministry have usually, although by no means invariably, made their mark in debate. It is a strange assumption that a good talker must be a good administrator, and that a strong government can be formed by parcelling out the offices among the leading debaters in the legislative body. At first sight it appears as irrational as the other corollary of the parliamentary system, that the public service is promoted by dismissing an excellent foreign minister, because the House of Commons does not like an unpopular clause in an education bill. Any one with a sense of humour can point out the incongruities in any human organisation, whether it works in practice well or ill. But there is, in fact, reason to expect that a leading debater will make a good head of a department. Influence is rarely acquired over a body so permanent as the House of Commons by mere showy eloquence. Real weight there must be based upon a knowledge of men, and a power to master facts and grasp the essential points in a situation. It must be based, in other words, upon the qualities most essential to a good head of a department in a government where, as in England, the technical knowledge, the traditions, and the orderly conduct of affairs, are secured by a corps of highly efficient permanent officials. No doubt all leading debaters do not make good administrators. Sometimes a minister is negligent or ineffective, and occasionally he is rash. There are men, also, who have outlived their usefulness, or who were once thought very promising, and have not fulfilled their promise, but who cannot be discarded and must be given a post of more or less importance. The system works, however, on the whole very well, and supplies to the government offices a few extraordinary, and many fairly efficient, chiefs, although it puts some departments under the control of poor administrators.

The power of creating peers would make it possible to select for the head of a department a tried administrator altogether outside of the parliamentary field. Something like this was attempted in the recent case of Lord Milner, who was offered, on Mr. Chamberlain's resignation, the post of Secretary of State for the Colonies. Lord Milner was, indeed, a peer at the time the place was tendered to him, but he had attended in the House of Lords only to take his seat. He had never spoken or voted there, and in fact had had no parliamentary career, his nearest approach to St. Stephens having consisted in standing on one occasion as a candidate for the House of Commons without success.

Formerly a statesman regularly began his official life as a parliamentary under-secretary; and he did not become the head of a department, or win a seat in the cabinet, until he had in this way served his apprenticeship in public administration—a practice which furnished both a guarantee of experience and a test of executive capacity. Of late years there have been a number of exceptions to this rule. Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr. Morley and Mr. Birrell, for example, were admitted to the cabinet, and put at the head of great departments without any previous training in the service of the government. As a rule, however, the old system is likely to prevail, because it is difficult for a man to make his mark in Parliament unless he begins his work there very young; and the exceptions occur only in cases of men of great ability.

The Need of Unity in the Cabinet.