THE RECONSTRUCTED CABINET.
AlR. BALFOUR has missed his final opportunity. If he had made the resignation of the Duke of Devonshire a reason for his own, and then resumed power with a Cabinet selected without attention to " claims ' and with a single eye to efficiency, he might at least have given pause to that great current of opinion which is, setting in against him personally as well as against his Government. As it is, the " reconstructed" Cabinet will not restore the prestige which has been shattered by the occurrences of the last few weeks. It has become a Cabinet of smaller men. The Inner Cabinet, which has always the initiative, if not the final, power of deciding on policy, and the necessary existence of which is the only plausible excuse, though in truth it is no excuse at all, for the way Mr. Ritchie and Lord George Hamilton were sidled out of office, lies in ruins. The strong man has gone, and the weighty man has gone, and whom has the Prime Minister selected to take their places ? Mr. Alfred Lyttelton, K.C., succeeds Mr. Chamberlain! He is a charming person of forty-six, who was once private secretary to Lord James, he has done some good work in South Africa of a quasi-judicial kind, he is a prosperous barrister, and he would perhaps make an excel- lent Ambassador. There is in him the indefinable quality of charm, and in foreign capitals charm has often proved itself a first-rate recommendation. But he has never dis- played the qualities required in what is now one of the most difficult and most visible of the great posts of the Empire ; to think of him as an adviser in the Inner Cabinet is difficult, and to name him in the same breath with Mr. Chamberlain as a debater is to misunderstand men and the House of Commons alike. The country does not remember a single speech of the Member for Warwick. And he has been selected, not by an instinctive though sudden appreciation on the part of the Prime Minister, but as a last resort, after days of attempting to persuade another man who would at least have been accepted by the country as a Minister with strength in him. The country knew Lord Milner, and while wondering that he should be willing to serve in a Protectionist Ministry, for be was trained as private secretary to Lord Goschen, would have been content in the circumstances to see him made supreme referee for the Colonies. The British people, which knows nothing of Mr. Lyttelton, and only smiles when he is praised as an athlete—the Times actually condescends to this—is certain, justly or unjustly, to regard him as a makeshift, and in politics makeshifts are minus quantities. The Houses, is the universal observation, must be very doubtful of Mr. Balfour if be is driven by want of men to so colourless a selection. Then it is admitted that Mr. Brodrick has not succeeded in reorganising the Army. A hundred excuses may be made for his failure ; but still he has not succeeded. If he had, Mr. Balfour could not have removed him, and would have been the last person in the world to try ; but he has not, and therefore he has been translated to the India Office. He may do better there, for he will not be baffled at every step by the same passive resistance, or worried by the same interferences ; but still the practice of translation is entirely bad. If a Cabinet Minister who is admitted to have failed is only to be transferred to an office of equal responsibility and dignity, what is the special inducement to any Minister to succeed ? We do not believe in guillotining failures, but we do believe in suspending their careers, if only as a hint that they must next time insist more strenuously upon results. Mr. H. 0. Arnold-Forster has been appointed to succeed him, and many say that in this selection, at least, Mr. Balfour has shown courage and decision. We think he has ; but has be shown them in the right place ? Mr. Arnold-Forster is a man of real ability—the descendants of the great schoolmaster have most of them got that—he is absolutely upright, and he knows a great deal about both the fighting Services ; but whether he has the weight to crush down the opposition he will meet with in the War Office we greatly doubt, while he certainly will not supply the weight withdrawn from the whole Cabinet. He has not the standing in the public mind. There are occasions when that does not matter, the mass of the people looking only to the chief ; but while Mr. Gladstone followed by units made up a formidable number, Mr. Balfour followed by units is only a decimal, the force of which is diminished as the units increase. Mr. Arnold- Forster will not have much time to extort recognition from the nation as an administrator. He is not a great debater, and he has a trick—it is only a trick—of rousing strong Parliamentary antipathies. That is sometimes to a Minister's credit, but it does not often help him when, as in the case of the War Office, the Minister has to encounter hosts of enemies called into action by his reforms. There remains Mr. Austen Chamberlain, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. A. Chamberlain has energy, insight, and power of speech ; but no Protec- tionist can make great Budgets, and as Cabinet Minister he will be horribly hampered by his personal position. He is not his father's equal, yet he will always be regarded as his father's stop-gap, a man selected to prove to the country that Mr. Chamberlain in retiring left his spirit, and his convictions, and his aims behind him in the governing body. If this were not the intention, why Mr. Austen Chamberlain? The remaining two Ministers do not signify. They will do as well as others, though Lord Stanley is a very odd choice for the Postmaster-General- ship. But the whole makes a Cabinet which will arouse no enthusiasm and very little hope, and Mr. Balfour will need both to carry through his fiscal revolution.
Infelicity in the choice of colleagues matters to a Premier in this country much more than to a Premier on the Continent. There the " group " system has developed itself so completely that every Minister except the chief is selected because he has behind him a " group " of Members so united that the qualities of their nominee matter comparatively little. They will always vote with him until they " spew " him out, and so long as they are faithful the Premier has his necessary majority. If the nominee is competent, so much the better, because there is less criticism, especially from the newspapers • but if he is not, the permanent staff do his work, and the Premier reflects, not on the consequences of his making mistakes, but on the consequences which, if he is superseded, may follow the alienation of his group, which, besides the personal affront, loses with him the share of patronage that keeps its own seats safe. In this country, on the other hand, a Minister strengthens a Cabinet through his own personal qualities, his eloquence, or his administrative faculty, or his general weight of character. If through them he has a hold on the whole people, he is a tower of strength to the entire Ministry. It does not matter, except in particu- lar crises, what office he holds. He may be only President of the Council—an office which, to the bewilderment of Con- tinental observers, is in this country of minor importance —but if he has made his party throughout the kingdom think his opinion of importance, or his presence a guarantee against rash experiment, he is a great man, and helpS in that object so constantly sought, and so seldom attained, the making of a great Governing Committee of the Empire. The general rule is slightly broken by the fact that in one office, the Exchequer, special knowledge, or the capacity of swiftly acquiring it, is almost impera- tive ; but it is the general rule nevertheless, and it demands of the Premier a peculiar acuteness in the selection of men which Mr. Balfour has never displayed. He has retained Lord Lansdowne as Foreign Minister and made Mr. Brodrick Secretary for India, and forgotten in the process that even if they were the fittest colleagues obtain- able for those offices, the nation does not think so, and that their presence consequently weakens the Governing Council considered as the Executive Committee which Parliament exists in order to support, to control, or to reject. We shall be told, of course, that Mr. Balfour could not help himself, that better men could not be found. We doubt it ; but admitting that it is true, is it not proof that the ablest men in the Unionist party decline to follow him in the course upon which, absolutely without necessity, he has with such a light heart em- barked ? " The strength of Kings is in the men who gather round the throne," and only genius of the first order ever supplies their absence. Even Mr. Gladstone could not carry Home-rule after his Administration had been broken up by the Unionist secession.
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