MR. GLADSTONE ON CABINET GOVERNMENT.
TN a contribution of extraordinary interest in the North- American American Review, Mr. Gladstone has recorded his experience of Cabinet Government. He has given his paper a fanciful and inappropriate title, because " Kin beyond Sea " suggests a much fuller exposition than Mr. Gladstone has attempted either of the resemblances or of the contrasts between the Constitution of England and the Constitution of the United States ; and he has prefaced it with some remarks on a totally different sub- ject, which on every ground would have been better omitted. But neither of these deductions affects the historical importance of the article. It is an account of the most distinctive element in the actual government of this country, by a man who has played a more important part in that Government than any Minister since Sir Robert Peel,—and from this point of view, its value as a record at first-hand is extreme. It is not that there is much that is new in it. In almost all its main particulars, it has been anticipated by the chapter on the Cabinet in Mr. Bagehot's " English Constitution." But Mr. Bagehot, though he was the first writer who described the actual working of the machine, could only describe it as an outsider. The interest of his account is derived from the acuteness and close observation which enabled him to supply the omission which had rendered all previous descriptions of the Constitution little better than academical exercises. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, speaks from the inside. He has himself been a member of Cabinets and a leader of Cabinets, and consequently, where Mr. Bagehot could but give a true hypothesis as to the deter- mining element in the Constitution, Mr. Gladstone supplies from his own experience the testimony which, even by itself, would be sufficient to establish that hypothesis.
The English Government is conventionally described as composed of King, Lords, and Commons. Such a description is totally worthless, because it does not take into account that Fourth Power upon which ".is concentrated the whole strain of the Government," and which " constitutes from day to day the true centre of gravity for the working system of the State." The persons who compose this Fourth Power are inseparably identified with one or other House of Parliament. The ex- ceptions to this rule are exceedingly and increasingly rare, Mr. Gladstone himself, who more than thirty years ago was Secretary of State for seven months without a seat in the House of Commons, being " by much the most notable instance for the last fifty years." Upon this Fourth Power, thus placed, "it devolves to provide that the Houses of Parliament shall loyally counsel and serve the Crown, and that the Crown shall act strictly in accordance with its obligations to the nation." Ministers are charged in the last resort with the regulation of the relations between the Crown and Parliament, without having any authority to coerce or censure either. " Their attitude toward the Houses must always be that of deference, their language that of respect, if not of submission. Still more must their attitude and language toward the Sovereign be the same in principle, and yet more marked in form." The place which the Sovereign holds in the actual Constitution is thus described by Mr. Gladstone :—" He is entitled, on all subjects coming before the Ministry, to know- ledge and opportunities of discussion, unlimited save by the iron necessities of business. Though decisions must ultimately conform to the sense of those who are to be responsible for them, yet their business is to inform and persuade the Sovereign, not to overrule him. Were it possible for him, within the limits of human time and strength, to enter actively into all public transactions, he would be fully entitled to do so. What is actually submitted is supposed to be the most fruitful and important part, the cream of affairs. In the dis- cussion of them, the monarch has more than one advantage- over his advisers. He is permanent, they are fugitive ; he speaks from the vantage-ground of a station unapproachably higher ; he takes a calm and leisurely survey, while they are worried with the preparatory stages, and their force is often impaired by the pressure of countless detail. He may be, therefore, a weighty factor in all deliberations of State. Every discovery of a blot that the studies of the Sovereign in the domain of business enable him to make strengthens his hands and enhances his authority."
It follows from this that the distinction between the Sovereign and the Crown is a vital distinction. The preroga- tives of the Crown are entrusted to men who must be pre- pared to answer for the use they make of them." The Sovereign, resting within this fence of responsible Ministerial agency, possesses real and very large means of influencing the use which his Ministers make of the prerogatives of the Crown, but he wields none of them himself. " In the face of the country, the Sovereign and the Ministers are an absolute unity. The one may concede to the other, but the limit of conces- sions by the Sovereign is at the point where he becomes willing to try the experiment of changing his government ; and the limit of concession by the Ministers is at the point where they become unwilling to bear what in all circumstances they must bear while they remain Ministers, the un- divided responsibility of all that is done in the Crown's name." Yet the Cabinet, which thus forms with the Sovereign an absolute unity in the face of the country, " lives and acts simply by understanding, without a single line of written law or constitution to determine its relations to the monarch, or to the Parliament, or to the nation ; or the relations of its members to one another, or to their head. It sits in the closest secrecy. There is no record of its proceedings, nor is there any one to hear them, except upon the very rare occasions when some important functionary, for the most part military or legal, is introduced, pro Inic vice, for the purpose of giving to it necessary information."
The working of this anomalous machine is guided by a functionary whose own position is not less anomalous. The Prime Minister, departmentally, " is no more than the first named of five persons, by whom jointly the powers of the Lord Treasurership are taken to be exercised ; he is not their master, or otherwise than by mere priority, their head ; and he has no special function or prerogative, under the formal constitution of the office. He has no official rank, except that of a Privy Councillor. Eight members of the Cabinet, including five Secretaries of State, and several other members of the Government, take official precedence of him. His rights and duties as head of the Administration are nowhere recorded. He is almost, if not altogether, unknown to the Statute Law." The account of the relations between the Prime Minister and the Cabinet is perhaps the most interesting part of Mr. Gladstone's article. No Minister probably has exercised greater influence over his colleagues than he has done, and what he says on this point may fairly be taken as representing the high-water mark of a Prime Minister's ascendancy, the level at which every Prime Minister aims, and which every Prime Minister attains in proportion as he is adequate to his part. Yet power, properly so called, over his colleagues the Prime Minister has none. " On the rare occasions when a Cabinet determines its course by the votes of its members, his vote counts only as one of them." But they owe their place in the Cabinet to him, and " in a perfectly organised Administra- tion, nothing of great importance is matured, or would even be projected in any department without his personal cognisance." More than this, "any weighty business would commonly go to him, before being submitted to the Cabinet." It is easy to see what large and indefinite predominance in the deliberations of the Cabinet the enjoyment of these rights must confer, upon a Minister able and determined to use them. The Prime Minister, again, is the intermediary between the Sovereign and the Cabinet ; but he is bound, when reporting the proceedings of the Cabinet to the Sovereign, as in all his other audiences, not to counterwork or divide it, and not to undermine the position of any of his colleagues in the Royal favour. If he has aims in view which are not shared by his colleagues, his business is to advise their dismissal ; he must not pursue those aims in his audiences of the Sovereign, while the Ministers who do not share them are still in office. " As the Cabinet stands between the Sovereign and Parliament, and is bound to be loyal to both, so he stands between his colleagues and the Sovereign, and is bound to be loyal to both." So, too, he must not override his colleagues in their own Departments. He must at times, of course, exert a potential influence in deter- mining the action of a Department, but his intervention with its head must not go beyond influence. If that is not sufficient for his purpose, he must either forego it, or advise the Sovereign to dismiss the particular Minister who stands in the way. Mr. Gladstone has a right to say that this " slight record " tells more than, " except in the school of British practice, is to be learned of a machine so subtly balanced, that it seems as though it were moved by something as delicate and slight as the mainspring of a watch."
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