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The term of office of Mr. Speaker is usually short. Arthur Onslow, who was elected in 1726, continued in possession of the Chair for thirty-five years, through five successive Parliaments, apparently without ruffling a hair of his wig. So long an occupancy is now wellnigh impossible. For one thing, the duties of Mr. Speaker are physically more responsible and irksome. The sessions are longer, the sittings of the House more protracted, and the fatigue of the prolonged and often tedious hours in the Chair must be most severe mentally and physically. Besides, there has grown up of late a preference for a certain maturity of age in the Speaker. Arthur Onslow was only thirty-six when he was called to the office. Henry Addington, who occupied the Speaker’s Chair at the opening of the nineteenth century, was thirty-two only on his appointment. William Court Gully, who was in possession of the Chair at the opening of the twentieth century, had passed his sixtieth year on his election. The occupancy of the office must be comparatively brief if men are appointed to it only when their heads are grey or bald. Of recent Speakers, Henry Bouverie Brand sat for twelve years, Arthur Wellesley Peel eleven years, William Court Gully ten years, James William Lowther sixteen years.
The Speaker receives a pension of £4,000 a year. John Evelyn Denison refused this retiring allowance. “Though without any pretensions to wealth,” he wrote to Gladstone, then Prime Minister, “I have a private fortune which will suffice, and for the few years of life that remain to me I should be happier in feeling that I am not a burden to my fellow-countrymen.” He retired in February 1872, and died, without heir, in March 1873. A peerage is also conferred on the Speaker when he resigns. This was not the custom in the eighteenth century. When Arthur Onslow retired in 1761, after his long service of thirty-five years, George III, in reply to the address of the Commons to confer on Onslow “some signal mark of honour,” gave him a pension of £3,000 a year for the lives of himself and his son, but no peerage. The custom began in the nineteenth century with Charles Abbot, who, on retiring in 1817, was made Baron Colchester. Since then every Speaker has been “called to the House of Lords”—Manners-Sutton as Lord Canterbury; Abercromby as Lord Dunfermline; Shaw-Lefevre as Lord Eversley; Denison as Lord Ossington; Brand as Lord Hampton; Peel as Lord Peel; Gully as Lord Selby.
But he is Speaker no longer; another presides in his place; and what a shadowy personage he seems, even as a Lord, compared with the resounding fame and distinction that were his in the glorious years when he filled with pomp and dignity the Chair of the House of Commons!
CHAPTER XII
HOW A GOVERNMENT IS MADE
1
Macaulay, writing to his sister Hannah on December 19, 1845, says: “It is an odd thing to see a Ministry making. I never witnessed the process before. Lord John Russell has been all day in his inner library. His antechamber has been filled with comers and goers, some talking in knots, some writing notes at tables. Every five minutes somebody is called into the inner room. As the people who have been closeted come out, the cry of the whole body of expectants is: ‘What are you?’ I was summoned almost as soon as I arrived, and found Lord Auckland and Lord Clarendon sitting with Lord John. After some talk about other matters, Lord John told me that he had be trying to ascertain my wishes, and that he found I wanted leisure and quiet more than salary and business. Labouchere had told him this. He therefore offered me the Pay Office, one of the three places which, as I have told you, I should prefer. I at once accepted it.”
But this Ministry was fated not to be formed. Both Lord Grey and Lord Palmerston, two leading members of the Whig Party, wanted the Foreign Office, and neither would recognize a superior claim in the other. Macaulay, from whose very lips the cup of office was thus rudely dashed, bore the disappointment philosophically. On the day after he had sent the letter, from which I have quoted, he wrote another to his sister, saying: “All is over. Late at night, just as I was undressing, a knock was given at the door of my chambers. A messenger had come from Lord John with a short note. The quarrel between Lord Grey and Lord Palmerston had made it impossible to form a Ministry. I went to bed and slept sound.”
When we come to consider the interesting business of making a Government, the first question that arises is—What is the chief test of a man’s capacity for office? Under our Constitution, with its free and unfettered Parliament, of which the Ministers must be Members, a deliberative assembly where everything is made the subject of talk, talk, talk, and provided with a Reporters’ Gallery for the dissemination of its debates through the Press, it is inevitable that a man’s fitness for a post in the Administration should be decided mainly by his gift of speech. It must often prove a false standard of judgment in regard to genuine ability and character. Glibness of tongue, or even oratory, is certainly not an essential qualification for the administrative duties of government. Still, the fact remains that the ready talker with but little practical experience of affairs has a better chance of office than the man of trained business capacity who is tongue-tied. Perhaps debaters are really more useful to a Government than business men in an arena of conflict like the House of Commons. There are some excellent anecdotes pointing to such a conclusion. Disraeli, forming an Administration, offered the Board of Trade to a man who wanted instead the Local Government Board, as he was better acquainted with the municipal affairs of the country than its commerce. “It doesn’t matter,” said Disraeli; “I suppose you know as much about trade as Blank, the First Lord of the Admiralty, knows about ships.” John Bright once said he asked Richard Lalor Sheil, an eloquent speaker, but unconnected with commerce, how it happened that he was appointed to the Board of Trade. “I think,” replied Sheil, “the only reason is I was found to know less of trade than any other man in the House of Commons.” Bright himself was made President of the Board of Trade in 1869. It used to be said in the Department that, so unfitted was he for administration, he did not know even how to tie up official papers with red tape.