We are told also in the same work that Gladstone, in his last term of office, came to hold strongly the view that these political pensions, which he himself created, should be abolished. Lord Morley says he was only deterred from trying to carry out his views by the reminder from younger Ministers, not themselves applicants, nor ever likely to be, that it would hardly be a gracious thing to cut off benefactions at a time when the bestowal of them was passing away from him, though he had used them freely while they were within his power.
4
I do not think it can be maintained that the salaries of Ministers are more than fair remuneration, considering the weighty and absorbing duties and responsibilities of the offices, and also the difficulty of attaining to them and the uncertainty of their tenure.[5] It is far from being an easy matter to become a Minister of the Crown. The posts are few, and the competition among the many aspirants to them is very keen. Most Members of Parliament never reach it, even though they may have had long and brilliant careers in public life. Fox, who was forty years in Parliament—having entered the House of Commons when he was nineteen, and retained his seat until his death at the age of fifty-nine—held Cabinet office for only about eighteen months. In 1782 he was Secretary of State for three months in the Rockingham Administration; in 1783 he filled the same office for nine months during his coalition with Lord North, who was the joint Secretary of State, with the Duke of Portland, as Premier, nominally rather than effectually at the head of affairs. Then followed twenty-three years of Opposition during the long and brilliant ascendancy of William Pitt. In January 1806 Pitt died, and in the Grenville Government which followed Fox returned to office for the third time as Secretary of State. Once more his tenure of the office was brief. After eight months it was brought to an end by his premature death in September, 1806. Fox was a rake, and, being a younger son, naturally was always in debt. But he never mourned for the spoils of office, so that he could the more freely indulge in his tastes as a man of pleasure. He desired office that he might embody his political ideas in Acts of Parliament. He moved his famous resolution for the abolition of the slave trade in June 1806; his health had broken down, and conscious that the end was near at hand, he declared that after forty years of public life he should retire, feeling that he had done his duty, if he carried his motion. The motion was carried by a majority of 99—114 voting for it, and only 15 against. It was practically his last appearance in the House. A few days later disease compelled him to retire.
On the other hand, William Pitt, as a Minister, was the spoiled darling of fortune. In 1782, at the age of twenty-three, he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the Shelburne Administration. He was out of office for the nine months in 1783, during which Fox and North were in power. But in December of that year, on the dismissal of the Coalition Government, he became First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Prime Minister, and he was not yet twenty-five. He held these offices for the unbroken term of seventeen years. As First Lord of the Treasury he had £5,000 a year, and £5,398 a year as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had, besides, the official residence in Downing Street. The Clerkship of the Pells, a sinecure office worth £3,000 a year, fell vacant on Pitt’s accession to power; and in that age of jobs it was deemed a remarkable instance of disinterestedness that, instead of taking the place himself, and thus acquiring an independence for life, he gave it to a friend. But on the death of Lord North in 1792, George III appointed him to the sinecure office of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, with a salary of £4,000—reduced by payments to subordinates to £3,080—and the seaside residence of Walmer Castle. For eight years, therefore, he had £10,398 per annum, and for another nine years, £13,478 per annum, from the State. Yet on his resignation in 1801—owing to the refusal of the King to sanction the emancipation of the Catholics, without which Pitt regarded the Union with Ireland which he had just carried as incomplete—he was in debt to the amount of £45,000. As his official salaries were stopped—though, of course, he retained the £4,000 a year as Lord Warden—he was in danger of being thrown into prison as a debtor. The merchants of London offered him a free gift of £100,000, and the King tendered him £30,000 from his Privy Purse, so that he might extricate himself from his unpleasant predicament. He declined both offers. He, however, accepted from fourteen personal friends and political supporters £11,700 as a loan, by which he was enabled to discharge the most pressing of his creditors. In May 1804 he returned to power as First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Prime Minister, and again drew the double salaries of £10,398 until he died, in office, on January 23, 1806. His debts were paid by Parliament. They amounted to the enormous sum of £40,000, exclusive of the £11,700 advanced to him in 1801 by his friends, who now declined repayment.
What was the explanation of Pitt’s indebtedness? His private life seems to have been remarkably pure. His one dissipation was an extra bottle of port. He was a bachelor. A man of cold and shy manners, he had few friends—his nose, as Romney said, was turned up to all mankind—he mixed little in society, and he was not given to hospitality. Yet with £13,478 a year, and town and seaside houses, “free of coal, candles and taxes”—to quote the official phrase of the time—in each of which he maintained but a plain and inexpensive establishment, he died at the early age of forty-seven, owing £51,700. The only explanation of the mystery that has been advanced is that, so absorbed was Pitt in public life, and so indifferent was he to money, he neglected his private affairs and was robbed by his servants. It was an hereditary weakness, perhaps. His father, the first Earl of Chatham, of whose private life Lord Chesterfield wrote, “It was stained by no vices, nor sullied by any meanness,” died in debt to the extent of £20,000, which Parliament paid, as well as settling an annuity of £4,000 a year on his successors in the earldom.
“Dispensing for near twenty years the favours of the Crown,” says Canning in the epitaph he wrote of William Pitt, “he lived without ostentation, and he died poor.” Further than this it is now impossible to carry the story of the material result to himself of Pitt’s official career. But these happy words are of general application as a tribute to the devotion, honesty, and self-sacrifice of the Ministers of the Crown. There is no instance of a Prime Minister who grew rich in office. Spencer Perceval, who was assassinated in the Lobby of the House of Commons, on May 11, 1812, left his family so ill-provided for that Parliament had to come to their assistance. As is usual in such cases, Parliament acted handsomely. It made a grant of £50,000 to the family, and voted to the widow a pension of £2,000 a year, which on her death was to be continued to the eldest son and increased to £3,000.
5
When Lord John Russell was Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury he publicly declared that no man without a private fortune could hope to fill any of the high offices of the State with freedom from pecuniary worries. “For my part,” he said, “I never had a debt in my life until I was First Lord of the Treasury.” A Minister was obliged largely to increase his personal expenditure in order to meet the social calls of his office. He must live in a better style as a Member of the Government than as a Member of the Opposition. A large house, servants, and carriages were essential to the adequate fulfilling of his social obligations as a Minister. “If I recollect aright,” said Lord John Russell to the Select Committee on Official Salaries in 1850, “when Monsieur de Tercy went from France to endeavour to make peace with the Dutch Government, he was very much struck, on calling upon the Grand Pensionary, to find the door opened by a servant-maid, and he thought it showed very great republican sympathy; and no doubt it was very becoming. But I think that if Lord Palmerston had only a housemaid to open the door, and Foreign Ministers called there, everybody would say that he was very mean and unfit for his situation.” Palmerston was, at the time, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and, being a wealthy man, was noted for his lavish hospitality. In fact, the £5,000 a year which the head of the Foreign Office is paid does not always cover the cost of living, and the social entertainments which he has annually to give. In addition to maintaining a position of great dignity in a becoming manner, he is expected regularly to entertain at his own expense the members of the various foreign diplomatic missions in London. Lord Rosebery has said that when he was Foreign Secretary in 1893 he spent half of his year’s salary upon two receptions at the Foreign Office.
Gladstone, like Lord John Russell, lived well in office and simply in opposition. On his appointment as Prime Minister for the first time in 1868 he took a house in that region of the rich and fashionable, Carlton House Terrace. After his defeat in the General Election of 1875 he wrote to his wife saying that they must retrench their expenditure. “The truth is,” he said, “that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House Terrace, I think, you would not find anyone with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with much more.” His official salary was but £5,000, and when it was stopped he retired to Harley street. During his two other terms of office as Prime Minister he inhabited the official house in Downing Street. Gladstone had a passion for public economy. He even grudged the spending of a small sum of money to make bright with flowers the little garden at the back of No. 10 Downing Street, so eager was his desire to limit the demands on the National Exchequer. But he always considered that he had well earned his allowance as Minister. Mr. John Bright, it seems, had a compunctious visiting of shame every time that the quarterly cheque for his official salary arrived, and once he disclosed his feelings to Gladstone. “There I don’t agree with you, Bright,” said Gladstone. “I’d rather take my official money than anything I receive from land, for I know I have earned every penny of it.”
The emoluments of office were an important consideration to some of the greatest men in political history. Burke, Pitt, Sheridan, Perceval and Canning had no hereditary fortunes, and if there were not adequate salaries attached to office they could not have given their great abilities to the services of the country in government and administration. Edmund Burke, whose movement for economic reform in the conduct of State affairs led to the abolition of many political sinecures, insisted, nevertheless, that reasonable emoluments should be paid to Ministers. He said: