TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE GROWTH OF CABINETS.
IT is clear that Cabinets are tending to become minia- ture Parliaments of the majority. When Macaulay wrote his review of Sir William Temple's Life in 1838,— that is, fifty-four years ago,—he said that the largest Cabinet of his time had never exceeded fifteen Members, and that that number had always been thought too large ; and that, in 1812, Lord Wellesley had expressed his conviction that even thirteen was an inconveniently large number. Now the Cabinet consists of seventeen, and is never smaller than fifteen, while there are continually new offices created for which it is demanded that the Ministers who hold them shall sit in the Cabinet. For example, this is demanded for the Minister for Scotland, the Presi- dent of the Board of Agriculture, and the Vice-President of the Council of Education. The two former Ministers were not in existence a few years ago, while the latter never sat in the Cabinet till after the Elementary Educa- tion Act of 1870 was passed. If a Labour Department be created, as is more than probable before long, we shall have the office of President of that Depart- ment assuming great proportions under Democratic Parliaments, and it will certainly be expected that he should have a seat in the Cabinet. Thus every- thing tends to the multiplication of new Cabinet offices ; while none of the old ones, unless it be that of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, dwindles in im- portance, and even that is wanted as a sort of maid-of-all- work for the Cabinet, to be filled by a versatile Minister whose hand can be turned now to one sort of work and now to another. The effect of this is naturally very un- wieldy Cabinets, very long Cabinet meetings, and the development of inner Cabinets of some four orfive of the more important officers, whose deliberations really decide the weightiest matters which come before the Government. We suppose the inner Cabinet of the present day, for instance, to consist of Mr. Gladstone, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Rose- bery, Mr. John Morley, and Lord Kimberley ; while the inner Cabinet of the last Government consisted of Lord Salisbury, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. Goschen, aided by confi- dential communications from the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Chamberlain. The effect of this creation of a key within the key, naturally is that full Cabinet meetings are never perfectly confidential, as the inner Cabinet cannot explain all its delicacies and difficulties to the outer ring ; so that their debates must often go on rather in the dark as to the more important questions brought before them. Indeed, the outer ring of Ministers lose in importance all that the inner ring gains. Thus the Cabinet becomes not only an unwieldy body for executive purposes, but, to some extent also, an imperfectly informed body, the inner Cabinet finding it obviously necessary to keep to itself many of the diplomatic difficulties which determine its decisions. Before the next half-century is out, we should expect to see the Cabinet touching the number of twenty, unless some very great constitutional change takes place ; and of these some fifteen or sixteen, at least, will be only half masters of the political points of the situation,—will, indeed, be rather links between the true Administration and the various off-sections of the party which support it, than influential Ministers.
What we have to consider are the advantages and dis- advantages of this intermediate Parliamentary body which connects the Administration with the composite party of the majority. Its advantages are all on the surface. It enables a Ministry at least to begin its career with a larger amount of party support, and also to receive fuller and more authoritative warning of the loss of confidence which it would incur by any particular policy, or by omitting to accept any particular policy. For example, there is no doubt that the presence of Mr. Fowler in the Cabinet has strengthened the confidence of the Noncon- formists and the Disestablishers in Mr. Gladstone's Government, and has made it certain that Mr. Glad- stone will sooner hear of any dissatisfaction which he may incur by not attacking the Establishment in Wales, or by not bringing in a measure to give the parents a voice in the management of National elementary schools. Again, the presence of Sir George Trevelyan and Mr. Asquith in the Cabinet has strengthened the confidence of the Scotch Disestablishment party in the Cabinet, and has secured that Mr. Gladstone will soon hear of any dissatisfaction which may be felt if the Disestablishment of the Scotch Church is not brought to the front of the battle, or if there is any disposition on the part of the Government to retire from the forward missionary policy in Africa and to evacuate Uganda. These are some of the obvious advan- tages of large outer rings in an Administration. They weaken the cohesion of the Executive Government ; they render Cabinets altogether less homogeneous bodies ; they increase the tendency to throw much greater responsibility on the inner circle of Ministers ; but they improve the avenues of communication between the Cabinet and the great party which gives it a majority in Parliament, and so diminish the danger of any sudden split between that party and the Government of its choice.
But, on the other hand, there are many disadvantages to set off against those advantages, which, in our judgmenl-, more than outweigh them. In the first place, the existence of this outer ring of Ministers necessarily greatly weakens the decisiveness and vigour with which the Government acts. There is something of what psychologists now call a dual consciousness in the nominal Cabinet. The mind of the inner Cabinet is intent on one thing, and yet it is aware that the mind, or rather minds, of the outer Cabinet are fixed on other and very different things. This produces a disposition to vacil- late and temporise which injures the authority of the Administration, and greatly diminishes the respect of the people at large for its decisions when they are at last taken. A Government that can say positively and promptly, We are going to do this, and expect our followers, if they wish to retain us in power, to support us in doing this. We alone know the whole difficulty of the situation, and we assure them that if we are to act on their behalf, they must be content to follow our advice in matters of which we see, and they cannot see, the full bearing,' has enormous advantages over a Government which hesitates and wavers, and of which it might be said that it is almost an even chance at last whether it goes this way or that. Unquestionably, an inner Cabinet, more or less controlled and modified by an outer ring of which it is very difficult to weigh the significance and strength of purpose, is very much less likely to obtain deference on the mere strength of its authority than one of the old-fashioned Cabinets which was homogeneous and of one mind in all things.
In the next place, the effect of this division into an inner Cabinet and an outer ring, is to diminish too much the area of political feeling upon the basis of which the inner Cabinet deliberates and acts. We think we have observed indications of this in several recent Cabinets.
For example, during the last Government, it is clear that the decision to prepare and push the Bill for the com- pensation of the holders of spirit licences,—a Bill, in our belief, perfectly fair and right,—was formed without sufficient knowledge of the violent and tenacious opposi- tion it would meet with in the country at large, and not merely in the Gladstonian Party ; and we strongly suspect that if there bad not been too small an inner Cabinet to consider and sanction the production of that Bill, it would never have been pressed, even if it had been proposed.
Again, in the case of Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet, the one that sent out General Gordon to Khartoum,—a policy which, as was well known at the time, never really approved itself cordially to the Prime Minister himself,—we believe that the inner Cabinet, chiefly, of course, Lord Granville, was overpowered by the urgency of a limited external pressure, mainly that of the Pall Mall Gazette ; whereas, if a larger number of Ministers had been consulted, Mr. GladstoLe would have been supported in his objection to that very responsible and risky act,—an act which, no doubt, was the principal cause of the fall of his Government. To our minds while it is quite impossible to bring all the most delicate subjects of Administrative policy before so miscella- neous a body as a Cabinet of seventeen, a, Cabinet of four or five is often too small to represent adequately the larger and broader instincts of statesmen on ad- ministrative or tactical questions of very high impor- tance. We believe that the shrinkage of the inner Cabinet is the direct result of the expansion of the outer Cabinet, and that both results are, on the whole, mis- chievous. The expansion of the outer Cabinet renders the Executive of the country vacillating on all subjects which are evidently subjects for the whole Cabinet, and which must be brought up before it before being decided on. On the other hand, on those inner questions especially affecting Parliamentary tactics, such as the Bills to be taken up by the Government, or questions of foreign policy, on which the whole Cabinet do not even expect to be consulted, the shrinkage of the inner Cabinet is often a great mischief. It leaves the minds of the Ministers chiefly concerned, too much at liberty to follow either their own discretion or capri- cious external influences to which they may have taught themselves to bow, and narrows the area of political judgment and instinct upon which alone great administra- tive decisions ought to be based. For our own parts, we very much wish that Cabinets could be reduced to the number of twelve, or even ten, and that those who make up such Cabinets could be really consulted on every important decision, not merely departmental, which involves far- reaching consequences to the Administration and the State.
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