TOPICS OF THE DAY.
CABINET-MAKING.
CABINET-MAKING is a very difficult business, worse even than choosing Bishops, though that has of late years been supposed to be a sore burden upon the dis- pensers of patronage. The choice of Ministers, which the public always discuss as if the Crown were free to choose at discretion, is hemmed in with restrictions, some of them, we fear, by no means favourable to the choice of the best executive officers, or even the wisest counsellors. Even when the Prime Minister is so far master that his resigna- tion would break his party to pieces, and can therefore shed colleagues as a tree sheds leaves—which has been the position both of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury—be is still seriously hampered. He must, to begin with, confine himself to the ranks of his own part v, first because men of the other side will not join him, and secondly because adoptions of that sort diminish the loyalty and destroy the coherence of the children of the household. Lord Salis- bury, for instance, could not have made Lord Kimberley Foreign Minister if he had wished it ever so much. Once or twice in our history a man, like Lord Palmerston, has been so popular or so separate that he could serve on either side without loss of character for himself or prestige for the Government, but such occurrences are rare. Then the Premier must not leave out any man who, like Mr. Balfour, is strongly distinguished by public favour, or, like Mr. Chamberlain, represents an important body of opinion, or, like Sir M. Hicks-Beach, is, on the whole, the safest man with whom to trust a vital Department of the State. Big blunders in finance or in in- ternal government would never do. Nor must he, except under a strain of circumstances visible to everybody, remove colleagues who have done fairly well, for that not only rouses bitter, and it may be dangerous, enmities, but it impairs the loyalty which should exist between chief and followers. Mr. Strutt was not an important person, but the political world was long in forgetting, when Lord J. Russell removed him, that. as Punch, said, " he found he'd resigned before be knew." There is, too, a claim of seniority which is often very powerful, though it is unrecognised in law, is in essence indefinable, and is subject to the odd limitation that social grade, personal popularity, and oratorical ability all count as the equivalents of years. Still, to put a young man or an Under-Secretary whom the Premier wants over the bead of an old man or a Secretary whom he does not want is a delicate operation, requiring to an unpleasant degree, unless the person so promoted is ex- ceptionally gifted, to be justified by results. Add that the distribution of offices between Lords and Commons is partially settled either by law or immovable etiquette ; and that although most of our politicians are well-to-do and have a keen sense of " duty to the Queen's Government," there are still human cravings for high office, many personal jealousies, and some bitter personal antipathies all to be considered; and we may see that the office of Cabinet-maker, thirsty as statesmen are for it, is not one to be altogether envied, or one that requires less nerve and ability than, say, the organising of a new theatre.
And then comes in the great restriction of all. Alone among the peoples of the world, whether Monarchical or Republican, we English have settled that the Crown in choosing the ruling Committee of the nation, the little group which really legislates as well as acts, shall be limited in its choice to less than a hundred persons, those, namely, who have obtained some prominence in Parlia- ment on the side of the dominant party. Nothiug in the Constitution prescribes this law, or prevents the Crown from making any male subject whom the Sovereign favours Minister of War or Foreign Secretary, but in practice the rule is immutable. The greatest lawyer in the land if not in Parliament could not be made Home Secretary, for he could not defend his measures ; the most successful Ambassador could not be Foreign Minister ; the best organiser of armies could not be Minister of War. No doubt if any such persons were Peers their selection would be less impossible, and if a man had made himself inevitable he could be made a Peer and a Secretary on the same day, but the making would be regarded, like the use of the prerogative to abolish purchase, as much too near a coup d'etat. There was much talk during the recent interregnum of bringing home Lord Curzon. or Lord Cromer, or Lord Pauncefote for the Foreign Office, and it was even whispered that Lord Roberts might be Secretary for War, but we doubt if any of those ideas ever got beyond the quidnuncs and the newspapers. The restriction is practically absolute, and it is a dreadfully confining one. It strikes out not only men like Sir A. -Milner, who would make a strong Secretary of the Colonies, and Mr. Seddon, who would be an ideal (Radical) Home Secretary, and Admiral Noel, most trenchant of born diplomatists, but any person whatever whose fitness is known to the Premier but who is neither Peer nor Member of the Commons. But that an Act of Parliament can do anything, the restriction might prove in an hour of extremity something more than in- convenient, and logically it is as difficult to defend as it would be to defend a law that all water for London should be drawn from the River Lea. In practice, no doubt, it works much better than it ought, because it draws to Parliament with irresistible force much of the available ability of the country, because it gives cohesion and vitality to the party system, because it induces the ambitious to show themselves statesmen and not Mr. Bryans, and because it deprives the great executive agents of the Crown of any wish to play to the gallery ; but still it is a most hampering restriction, and one which adds strength to all the others. Taken together they fetter a Premier at every turn, and, we may add, enormously strengthen the argument, usually drawn from other sources, that Cabinets should be small. In swollen Cabinets a considerable proportion of Ministers, drawn as they are from so confined an area, must be mediocrities, and as Cabinets on occasion decide by voting, a crowd of mediocrities must occasionally impair its collective judgment. They would very often but for the unwritten law once laid down by Lord John Russell to define the difference between a Premier and his colleagues. The Premier, he said, is only prirnus inter pares, but if the difference of opinion is serious the colleague resigns and the Premier does not.
The network of restrictions which we have described is the best excuse for any failures a Premier may make in bringing together his governing Committee, and for the practice, otherwise so objectionable, of stereotyping the group from which selection is to be made. It is so hard within a number so unreasonably limited to get a new man who seems to fulfil all the conditions. Still, success in the effort is one of the things that is required of great Premiers, and especially of one who might have broken through some of them, and Lord Salisbury must not claim on their account exemption from criticism. On the whole he has this time been fairly successful, though Lord Lansdowne's appointment is, as we said before, either a mistake or an experiment only to be excused by success, and Mr. Wyndham—whose claims are undeni- able, and who is a great-grandson of Lord Edward Fitz- gerald—is, we fear, sent to Ireland under the illusion that brilliant men suit Ireland best. They do not. The most suc- cessful Governors of Ireland have been men, like Thomas Drummond, at once solid and impartial. Still, though the Cabinet seems to a superficial view less strong as an executive body controlling this vast Empire than could have been desired, we have the Premier the whole country wishes for, new and strong men at the War Office and the Admiralty, a Colonial Secretary who has done great things besides making himself inevitable, as good a Chan- cellor of the Exchequer as we are likely to find till Mr. Hanbury is a little farther forward, and a Secretary for India of whom the worst that can be said is that fate must have some spite against him, his Empire encounters so many and such grave misfortunes. Had the Cabinet but included a strong Minister for Foreign Affairs the country would have looked to the next six years with cheerful con- tentment, though it must not be forgotten that years bring age, and that in 1906 Lord Salisbury will be seventy-aix and the Queen herself eighty-seven.
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