CABINET SALARIES.
711E very worst economy which the nation could make would be the permanent cutting down of Cabinet salaries.
This statement, if made eighteen months ago, would nave met with such strong and universal acquiescence from all reasonable men that we should have been almost ashamed to emphasize it in our pages. So great, how- ever, has been the upheaval of the war in matters of public thought and conduct that it has become a positive duty to give expression to this truism. When public writers are beginning to ask why Cabinet Ministers should be paid more than Major-Generals or than permanent civil Servants, and it is suggested that there are plenty of people just as good as the present Ministers who would be willing to take on the job for half their salaries, is high time to recall the nation to the older and sounder views as to public office and public emolument. ho first Lord Cornwallis, among the wisest and noblest of Indian statesmen, was during his term of office at Calcutta asked by the Directors of the East India Company to cut down the salaries of their servants. He refused, and in his despatch to the India House stated that he had no doubt that there would be hundreds of applicants for his own post of Governor-General at only half or quarter of his salary, or no salary at all ; but he added : 'Would it really be worth the Company's while to make such a reduction ? Would it not be certain to prove a very false economy?' Unquestionably it would have been. Talleyrand, when the new Constitution was being drawn up, was asked by Louis XVIII. whether he did not think that the new Peers of France should be invited to sit in their House without salaries. In the King's opinion, the honour was so great that the Peers would be pleased to serve gratuitously. " Gratuit ? All, Sire, ca serait trop slier ! " came the instant comment.
We are not cynics, and do not agree with Talleyrand, for we know that a great deal of splendid work is done in this country by men who are not only unpaid, but look for no indirect emolument for their services in the way of patronage or opportunities of feathering their nests from the public purse. Indeed, we will go so far as to say that we would rather, even though it would in our opinion be eontrary to true democratic ideals, see our chief rulers without any salaries at all than inadcuately paid. In spite of Talleyrand, the men who serve high offices gra- tuitously are safer, from the public point of view, than men who are paid low salaries. Speaking generally, the higher, the more responsible, the less permanent, and therefore the less regularized and co-ordinated—or shall we say less regimented in hard-and-fast service I—is an office, the more essential is it that its holder should be well paid. Rightly or wrongly, we are ruled by the Cabinet. The Cabinet Ministers hold the fate of the ration and of each one of us in their hands, and it would therefore be madness not to give them every opportunity to discharge their high offices with quiet minds, unworried by those economic troubles which, say what we like, must, even with the most virtuous, be attached to narrow means, and still more without those temptations to betray the public trust which, the more prominent a man is and the more powerful, necessarily become the more intense. Again, we want our rulers as far as possible to be economi- sally beyond the roach of that intangible dominance which is exerted by the very rich man over the man who is in narrow circumstances—that is, troubled for money. It raay well be that if your Cabinet Minister with the salary of a bank clerk is a hero, he can mix with millionaires and men of great possessions on equal terms and not be affected by the fact that at every turn his action is limited • by want of money. But even if we expect such heroism in can we expect it in his family ? If we cannot, that dominance of which we have spoken will grow up in a social association which it is impossible to prevent between those • who wield great political power and authority in the State and those who are rich. We are not thinking of ordinary eorruption in the crudest and most vulgar sense, or of rnoney passing, but of that subtle influence which makes it very difficult for a man with 11,000 a year, a large family, debts, and no prospects to stand up to the man of 130,000 a year, let alone of £100,000. "You have proved too much in your argument for keeping, Cabinet Ministers' salaries at a fairly high figure,' we can hear our critics say. "It is obvious that the public would never consent to pay salaries to Cabinet Ministers which would put them on an equality with the great landowners or kings of the commercial world, and therefore the argument fails." Not a bit of it. All experience shows that in order to be saved from what we have called the intangible dominance of great wealth a man does not in the least want to be equal in income to the millionaire. All that is necessary is that an income should be given which would secure for the ordinary normal man living in normal circumstances financial independence, and save him from the worries of small means, or what must be called small means in the world in which he moves. Now it is of course impossible to lay down absolutely what is the exact figure which, without pampering our Cabinet Minister, will secure him, as far aa mere pecuniary arrangements can, the independence required for the due exercise of the functions of government. Still, a figure for working purposes can be arrived at, though clearly it must be subject to alteration as social circumstances change. We have often thought that the politicians who in the eighteenth century had sufficient financial daring to fix the salary of a Pnisne Judge at £5,000 a year showed an extraordinary example of political common- sense. At that time £5,000 a year was a sufficient sum, and it is still sufficient, to put a man beyond the reach not only of temptation, but of the intangible dominance of wealth. Who can 'doubt that if our British Bench had been paid only £500, and had been told with fine rhetoric that good men could be as honest and as high-minded on a small salary as on a large, it would have failed to hold its present high position in the world ? The fact that every Judge has a salary which makes him capable of living the life of the class in which he moves without worry, and without being exposed to pressure to obtain more money somehow or other in order to live like other people, has been the antiseptic of our judicial system. Again, the fact that a Judge, after a moderate period of service, can 'retire upon a thoroughly adequate pension enormously increases his independence. It makes it unnecessary for him to save against the eventuality of his living beyond the period when he can continue his work. To come to concrete considerations, we can well understand the desire of many Cabinet Ministers at the present moment to set an example •in national economy by cutting down their salaries during the war, and we sympathize with and applaud their intention. Provided that it is clearly understood that the salaries are only cut down for the war, and will automatically return to a higher figure when the war is over, we see no objection. What we do object to in the public interest is the notion that there could be any real economy or advantage to the nation from a permanent reduction of Cabinet salaries. On the contrary, we hold that incalculable injury will be done by such a piece of Peck- sniffian folly. Our voice, at any rate, shall be raised with all the emphasis possible to prevent us from drifting into the hideous condition under which it can be said, as has sometimes been said in America, that a man's pay in the public service is "four thousand dollars and 'steals.'" What we are concerned with is not what will be done during the next eighteen months or two years, but the permanent situation. And here we may once more urge what we have urged before on several occasions— we fear to deaf ears—that the whole system of Cabinet salaries ought to be revised, and that in order to give Ministers that security which is absolutely essential to good government there should be a retiring allowance of half their pay for all Cabinet Ministers who have held office for more than two years. We put the duties and obligations of Cabinet office, both from the point of view of the office-holder and of the nation, very high indeed. In our opinion, it is a sacred trust, and as such it must be treated. Any man, then, who has been found worthy to serve his country as a Cabinet Minister ought to be regarded as a man set apart for public service—a person to be treated with generosity and distinction. He ought, therefore, when in the active or the potential service of the nation, to receive payment which would give him security. Whilst he was a Cabinet Minister he should, we hold, never have a salary of less than 14,000 a year, and when out of office— when not actively engaged in administering the affairs of the nation, but waiting, under our system, for the possibility of another call for such service—we would give him half-pay ; i.e., 12,000 a year. It would not, however, be reasonable to make such posts and such salaries unlimited in number, and we would therefore enact that the paid members of the Cabinet should never number more than fifteen, a limit which would carry advantages far greater than those of finance. The first advantage of this arrangement would be that the Cabinet Minister, especially if, as we should like to see, he had in addition an official residence, furnished, warmed, and lighted, would have a salary which even in these days would place him well above the line of narrow circumstances, more particularly as he would not be forced to save against the time when he would be out of office. The knowledge that he would never come down to absolute poverty, and have to look out in a hurry for some way of making an income by which to support his wife and family,. which is literally what must happen to many Cabinet Ministers in existing circumstances, would be an enormous gain. (It is not pleasant to write in this way, but everybody knows that there are a certain number of Cabinet Ministers now in office who have given up lucrative professions in order to serve the State, and who when they go out of office must either suffer the degradation of having to pick up a living as company directors, or must live by their pens, and become what we hope we shall not be thought brutal for describing as glorified publishers' hacks.) The knowledge that he would retire on half-pay would give a man a sense of security that nothing else would give. Another advantage of the system would be that, if men who had once reached the rank of Cabinet Ministers were not merely thrown out to sink or swim in the ocean of the national life, but were kept on a waiting- list at half-pay, Ministers in office could without any hesitation ask their opponents to do a great deal of that unpaid non-partisan work which can be so usefully done by ex-administrators. There are always Committees, Royal Commissions, and inquiring bodies who want Chairmen, and it is very often of the utmost importance that these Chairmen should know the way in which the machine works, and should, in effect, be ex-Cabinet Ministers.
Though we should like to see a salary of 15,000 a year for Cabinet Ministers, with half-pay when out of office, we suggest as a compromise that 14,000 should be the regular salary and 12,000 the half-pay, provided that the Cabinet Minister placed on half-pay should have held office for a period of not less than two years. Next, we would make the Prime Minister's salary, as is only reasonable, £5,000 a year. In addition to this, we would allow those Cabinet Ministers who, as representatives of the nation in certain great Departments, are bound to do a good deal of official entertaining, to draw for such entertaining an allowance of /1,000 a year. Those who would be entitled to this allowance would naturally be the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Secretaries of State for War, the Colonies, and India, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Lord Chancellor, and the Home Secretary. All these officials should, in our opinion, be offered an official house, furnished, warmed, and lighted, free of charge, in order that their official entertainments might have a setting worthy of the nation. As we have said, indeed, we should like to give every Cabinet Minister an official residence, and this, curiously enough, could be quite easily arranged, as so many charming private houses, like Gwydyr House and Dover House, have been acquired by the nation. Again, there are suitable houses in Queen Anne's Gate, and also the Royal Commissions House that abuts on the Abbey. They are not well designed for offices, and the administrative staffs now housed there could gradually be accommodated in offices built for the purpose.
Before we leave this subject we would most earnestly ask the present Coalition Cabinet to consider the whole problem in the light in which we have placed it, and hardening their hearts against any foolish criticism made from outside, do the right thing by the nation, and free us from the nightmare of men wielding immense power not only on insufficient salaries but without security. We have no hesitation in saying that the prospect of a man after, say, ten or twelve years' service, going out of office to live literally on a clerk's income, is utterly deplorable. It is a difficulty, which somehow or other will have to be remedied, probably by the invention of sinecures if our scheme is not adopted. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the Coalition Ministry could confer no greater permanent benefit upon the nation than to settle this question of salaries once and for all. They are in a unique position to do so, for they would represent an agreement of the two parties, and they need fear no criticism or scathing remarks from their political rivals as to feathering their own nests, and so forth. Here is a great opportunity to do agreat public good. Will the Ministry rise to the occasion and take it ? Under the pooling scheme, which we are interested to think was originally suggested in the Spectator, they have in a half-hearted and unofficial way carried out half the programme. All that they have to do now is to systematize this and adopt the plan of half-pay. That in itself would mean lowering salaries rather than raising them, but if in addition to that they like to adopt the self-denying deduction of twenty-five per cent. during war time, the nation will no doubt regard it as a graceful act and a good example. It must, however, be clearly understood that it is purely a war-time measure, and that the salaries must go back ultimately to the figure which we have named, and which we are sure-is the very lowest that in peace time can safely be paid to a Cabinet Minister.
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