MAKING CABINETS.
irritating and alienating the responsible and sometimes powerful Ministers left outside the innermost circle. These considera- tions are familiar ; but there is another, less frequently dis- cussed, which is also of importance. The extension of the Cabinet, which seems sometimes to diminish the difficulties of Cabinet-making, often, we suspect, increases them. When the places are so few that only indispensable men can have seats, the Premier has comparatively little diffi- culty, all pretenders bowing before necessity ; but when they are many, his hand is constantly being forced. There is no work in the government of the Empire so difficult or, except to minds of a peculiar order, so disagreeable al that of Cabinet-making. The ideal process would be to pick out the seven or eight best administrators and debaters of the party. give them the offices best suited to their special capacities, and then commence work ; but that ideal is never realised. A King may make a Cabinet in that way, and, more or less, the King of Prussia does so in his hereditary dominion ; bat a British Premier ruling a democratic State has many more things to think of. After the three or four indispensables are appointed, he has to select the remainder among the candidates with the strongest claims ; to place them, if possible, in offices they like and are fit for ; to consider the " representation of departments" in both Houses ; to reflect about the seats of the Commoners he has selected ; to submit to the remon- strances of colleagues nearly equal to himself who want followers ; and finally, to soothe or to disregard applications pressed on him, often by large cliques, within the Houses. It becomes nearly impossible, as matters now stand, for the Queen's representative to form the Cabinet he really wishes for, or a homogeneous one, or one in which he is fairly secure against the resignations which, ever since 1867, have marked and embarrassed our Cabinet history. It is hardly possible to persuade outsiders that with a Cabinet of fifteen there is no room for their favourites, and impossible to con- vince claimants that in neglecting them the Premier is only yielding to a political necessity. When many posts are vacant, the personal questions come to the front, and the personal questions are, in our day, of all others the most unmanage- able. It is not that men are more ambitious, or more selfish, or more conceited than of old ; they are probably less so, and office is no longer the prize it was in the days of perquisites and patronage ; but the Prime Minister is more fettered by the public favour for individuals, and by the men behind each candidate, who are far more unreasonable on his behalf than he is for himself. The difficulties of choice have been multiplied by new influences and the excessive inter- ference of the Press, until they have become exasperating ; and when a Cabinet has to be remade, they are multiplied fivefold. It is usually impossible to remake a Cabinet with- out resorting to extrusions, and extrusion is the most heart- breaking of tasks. It has to be performed, because the Cabinet is already unwieldy ; but, not to mention that the Premier has hardly any recognised power of compelling a resignation—the dismissals frequent in the last century having become in ours the rarest of events—a Premier, unless exceptionally hard, feels an expulsion in the general interest of the State to be almost a brutality. It is a kind of direct insult levelled at a colleague with whom he was yesterday on terms of intimacy, and whom, perhaps, he personally values as a friend. A King can give such a shock unharmed, for Kings are above friendship, and usually act, at all events in the supposed interest of the State ; and a man Elle Prince Bismarck may regard all colleagues as mere instru- ments; but to the ordinary Premier, who is usually an English gentleman, and rarely a man entirely self-contained, extrusion must be a most bitter task. We hardly wonder that, when performed, it is performed rudely, with the abruptness and want of apparent consideration with which a friend, if strongly moved, will often tell another friend the disagreeable thing that it behoves him to know. There is no making such a communication pleasant, and so it is made, or left as it were to make itself, anyhow. There is, in fact, nothing to say except, " I must do it," and that is almost as brutal an excuse as it is possible to make.
Take this lamentable case of Lord Iddesleigh, for instance. There seems to be a sort of consensus among Conserva- tives that Lord Iddesleigh, who never treated any one roughly in his life, not even when, as has happened, he wanted rough treatment, was, in the remaking of the Cabinet, roughly used. He, the second person in her Majesty's Government, first heard that he had lost his seals from the public newspapers. We hope it will be shown that the occurrence was accidental, and can hardly believe it to have been otherwise ; but just reflect for an instant what the Premier's position was. In his own judgment, it was essential that a new man—Mr. Goschen—should enter the Cabinet, and that, in consequence, certain changes must be effected which rendered it expedient, in the public interest, that he himself should take the Foreign Office. Every- body agrees that the necessity had arisen, and that Lord Salisbury was, in the interest of the nation, right in his decision as to his own proper work ; yet how, with our system of society, was such an announcement to be pleasantly made to Lord Iddesleigh ? It could be made by a King easily enough, for a King has no interests ; but how can a man tell a colleague nicely that he himself wants his particular post, and has difficulties in offering him an equal one ? There is no equal one, to begin with ; and a British Premier has, in practice, an exceedingly limited power of shuffling his cards without making enemies throughout his party, which it is clearly, in the national interest as well as his own, his business to avoid. Such a communication is the hardest of duties, and becomes harder in exact proportion to the claims, high character, and high estimation of the Minister to whom the communication must be made. We do not, we confess, wonder at any failure of consideration under such circumstances— consideration seeming such a mockery—any more than we wonder at the deep resentment such arrangements always create. It is hardly in human nature not to be resentful and not to refuse alternative posts, the impression that the sufferer's usefulness has been destroyed by a visible slight being naturally for the time in the ascendant. It would have been like the peculiar graciousness of Lord Iddesleigh's character, to have remained under such circumstances in the Cabinet ; but we have no more right to expect supererogatory grace from any politician than that he should act always on counsels of per- fection.
Nothing more bitter can be required of a Premier than work of this kind ; but then, also, the country should remember that there is occasionally nothing more necessary to be done. To govern a country well, a Premier must hurt his friends sometimes, as a King must hurt his courtiers ; and in refusing to hurt them, he does but postpone the national weal to his own comfort, even if the form of the comfort be the kindly regard of supporters. In making Cabinets, as in so many more of the businesses of life, it is harsh not to take account of feelings ; but it is weakness to yield to them when the public service requires a hard decision. The public is, we fear, in its new softness, somewhat forgetting that, as it is forgetting in every direction that governing, if it is to be useful at all, must constantly involve hardship to a portion of the governed. It may be shown hereafter that it would have been better if Lord Salisbury had thought more of the natural and fitting pride of an eminent colleague and his followers ; but it cannot be shown that it was not his duty to think of the Kingdom first. Now, the interest of the Kingdom, by all men's consent, required that he himself should be Foreign Secretary, and he could not be Foreign Secretary without inflicting on some colleague natural and severe pain. That was the necessary consequence of action ; and as action was necessary, it had to be faced, as it has to be faced whenever any one does anything whatever. Our world has been lapped in ease till it thinks it unfair that even road-making should be hard work.
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