[54] Mr. Gladstone combined this office with that of the Premiership. Sir Robert Walpole, Lord North, Mr. Pitt, Mr. Canning, and Sir Robert Peel had each held the two offices simultaneously.
[55] For example, in 1873 the Public Accounts showed a Postal expenditure of £5,000,000; but then, on the other side of the ledger, the nation was credited with £5,000,000 of receipts earned by the Post-office. The Tory financial critics could not be got to see that the only right way of comparing the real expenditure of a Government at any two selected dates is to deduct from the gross sum moneys which come in aid of outlay, and which are yet not taxes, and then compare the results.
[56] Mr. Disraeli’s Government need not be blamed too harshly for letting the Army alone. Till the fall of the Second Empire Parliament would probably not have voted the money or passed the measures necessary to put an end to the chaotic confusion and Crimean inefficiency of the military system under which orators used to declare “British troops had ever marched to victory.” But Mr. Corry, Mr. Disraeli’s First Lord of the Admiralty, had no such excuse for his neglect to build first-class ironclads. Even the Manchester Radicals would have voted him the money for that purpose had he been courageous enough to confess what was the truth, namely, that when he took office the British Navy was behind the age, and as a fighting force pitiably weak and obsolete. Another costly blunder was committed by Mr. Corry. He had not firmness enough to silence clamorous claims for commissions. Hence he over-officered the Navy, till it almost seemed at one time as if he meant to man his line-of-battle ships with his redundant admirals and his superfluous captains.
[57] This was due, however, not so much to the action of the Government as to the falling-in of terminable annuities, which reduced the charges for the National Debt.
[58] Of course the Queen cannot prevent a man from receiving a Foreign decoration, and he can wear it in Society without incurring prosecution, just as he might, if vulgar enough, wear a masonic star of the cheeseplate order of architecture on his breast. But he cannot wear it at Court, and the grievance of the British snob is that the Queen’s objection to his accepting a Foreign Order prevents Foreign Governments—except semi-barbarous ones—from bestowing it on him. Queen Elizabeth said that “she did not like her dogs to wear any collar but her own.” It is not so generally known that the Queen’s grandfather, George III., whose metaphors were usually of a more pastoral character than those of the great Tudor Princess, expressed the same feeling when he said that he “liked his sheep to wear his own mark.”
[59] Alice Grand Duchess of Hesse, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland. Biographical Sketch and Letters, p. 308.
[60] If, for example, the Prince of Wales and his children died, the Duke of Edinburgh would have succeeded him. The succession to the English throne, unlike that to most European Sovereignties, is governed by the same law which regulates the succession to all Scottish dignities and most of the very ancient English baronies, namely, descent is to heirs general, male or female; but then all males must be exhausted ere the right of the females accrues. Thus the Duke stood before his elder sisters and their families in the line of succession.
[61] Alice Grand Duchess of Hesse, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland. Biographical Sketch and Letters, pp. 317 and 318.
[62] This was the letter to “My dear Grey,” in which Mr. Disraeli accused the Ministry of a policy of “blundering and plundering.” As they were in power solely because he had refused office, the attack of course recoiled on his own party.
[63] A Selection from the Correspondence of Abraham Hayward, Q.C., Vol. II., p. 254.