TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE POWER OF THE TREASURY. THE world of politics, like the world of art and litera- ture, or even the world of theology, has its fashions. At present one of the most marked of political fashions is to abuse the Treasury. Any man who wishes to show that he understands the real drift of events and is to some extent behind the scenes will tell you that the real cause of this or that breakdown or disaster is the refusal of the Treasury to grant the money. It is all very well, we are told, to be angry with the soldiers, but the fact is the Treasury were asked months ago to provide this or that necessary, or to allow this or that policy to be pursued, but they absolutely refused, and so nothing was done and the inevitable smash came. With a great deal of this abuse of the Treasury we are entirely out of sympathy. As far as it is a demand for greater lavishness, we may say, indeed, that we condemn it altogether, for we are convinced that there is nothing more true than that it is economy and efficiency, and not lavishness and efficiency, that go hand-in-hand. At the same time, we are aware that a good. many mistakes have been made and a good many most important opportunities missed because of the im- possibility, as the phrase goes, of getting a .25 note out of the Treasury. Money has had to be poured out like water in December because there was an imperative refusal to spend a reasonable sum in June. In other words, we believe that what may be called the pure Treasury view—the view that all new demands for expenditure ought to be resisted to the utmost—has prevailed too largely in our Administration during the past ten or twelve years. The Treasury, that is, has assumed, or rather has drifted into, the position of a kind of imperium in imperio. Too often men in the highest office have been heard to say: "Oh, yes, of course the thing ought to be done, and done at once, but it is useless to think of it. It is simply impossible to get the money out of the Treasury. They will not hear of it." Even• Prime Ministers have been credited with declarations that some scheme whose importance they fully recognised must be abandoned because "you will never get the Treasury people to agree."
But if this is so, it is a grievous fault in our Administra- tion. If the Prime Minister—i.e., the person primarily responsible for the Administration as a whole—considers that a thing ought to be done it ought to be done, and no other Department should be able to exercise any veto on the decision. What is the remedy ? We believe that the remedy is that which was suggested by Henry VII. when they told him that "all Ireland could not rule the Earl of Desmond," and he re- plied, "Then the Earl of Desmond must rule all Ireland." If the head of the Administration cannot rule the Treasury, then the Treasury had better be recognised as the supreme power which it in fact is. After all, there is nothing new in this notion. It was a discovery made very early in our history that the purse rules all. The power of the purse first made the House of Com- mons supreme. Next it made the Lord High Treasurer, or rather his representative, the First Lord of the Treasury, supreme among the Ministers appointed, or virtually appointed, by the House of Commons. It was no accident that the office almost invariably held by the Prime Minister was that of First Lord of the Treasury, but a clear recognition that the supreme power in the Administration rested with the Treasury. If we look back at our political history, we shall find almost without exception that the Ministries that have been strongest and most efficient have been the Ministries in which the Premier directly con- trolled the Treasury. Sir Robert Walpole while Premier directly controlled the Treasury. Mr. Pitt was almost always First Lord of the Treasury. and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir Robert Peel was essentially a Treasury man ; so was Mr. Gladstone. These great Ministers to a .very large extent owed their successful tenure of office to the fact that they not only controlled the policy of the country, but also directly held the purse-strings, and decided when and how the money required for the carrying out of their policy, at home and abroad should be spent. They exercised the Treasury control themselves, and knew exactly when to loosen and when to tighten the purse. strings.
In our belief, as we have already suggested, no Adminis- tration can be really healthy, and so successful, till these conditions prevail. It must not be supposed that we insist upon this fact in order that there may be greater lavishness in public affairs and a less vigilant watch kept on leakages from the national reservoir. On the contrary, we believe that when it is recognised that the paying of the piper and the calling of the tune must go together there will be less, not more, waste in the conduct of public affairs. What we want to insist on is that the man who directly controls the Treasury must tend to become the ultimate ruler of the country—practically every vital act of State requires expenditure—and that therefore it is necessary for the welfare of the Administration that he shall not be shut up in a water-tight compartment, but shall take the full political responsibility for the final financial decisions he arrives at. We all remember Lord Salisbury's sharp and witty complaints against Treasury control some two years ago. We listened and were amazed, but in reality his complaints were tantamount to an admission of abdication in the matter of supreme power. If the Prime Minister personally controls the Treasury he cannot get rid of responsibility in that easy, but from the national point of view eminently unsatisfactory, way. When such a Premier has to decide on a policy he has to look at the matter in two ways. First he has to consider whether it is desirable per se, and next whether, when the financial burdens it will involve are reckoned up, its intrinsic merits are outbalanced by the financial sacrifice required. If he decides that the policy is worth the candle, he must, since no nation has or can have an inexhaustible purse, deter- mine that other new departures involving expense shall be modified or abandoned. That is, he must take the responsi- bility of doing one thing and not doing another, and of raising the money which will be required to do the thing he decides to do. But these problems are so inextricably inter- mixed that it is essential that they should primarily be Judged and analysed in the same brain. If the Prime Minister has no personal control over or responsibility for the Treasury he is very apt to think out his political problems in isola- tion and without any very definite relation to expenditure. When he has come to a decision, either as to some plan of his own or else in endorsement of a plan put forward by a colleague, he goes to the Minister at the head of the Treasury in order to get him to foot the bill. But here we turn to the other side of the shield. The Minister in question is. also apt to consider the problem in isolation, and. too much merely as a Treasury problem. While the Prime Minister is saying This thing is absolutely necessary and the Treasury must find the money somehow,' the Minister responsible for finance is saying The Treasury simply cannot stand any new burden ; the Prime Minister must alter or postpone his projects.' Then comes a tug-of-war between the two Ministers. But unfortunately, it is not the better policy which wins, but the stronger man. The Premier may be right, but if the Chancellor is sufficiently tenacious he may carry his point, and the public interest may suffer. And this defeat for the Premier need not in any way be due to weakness. He may be a strong man and yet be unable, for external reasons, to risk the loss of a powerful colleague at a given moment. If he had to find the money himself he might be able to do it, but to show an unwilling man how to find it and yet remain in office is a very different thing. Of course the Chaneellor may be easy-going, but in that case the remedy is even worse than the disease. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer endorses as a matter of course all proposals made to him by a Prime Minister who has not considered them financially, the nation will soon be on the :verge of bankruptcy. When, however, the Prime Minister considers them fully from the financial point of view, he has in fact become the controlling force at the Treasury. If, on the other hand, the Chancellor of the Exchequer uses his power of rejecting proposals on purely financial grounds, there is grave danger of the right things being left undone and the wrong things done. Again, if the Chancellor goes fully into all the political aspects of the schemes proposed and decides on the merits, he becomes in fact Premier. In a word, if the Premier does not possess, like Walpole, Pitt, Peel, and Gladstone, a personal- control at the TreaSury, one of two things must happen. Either the Chancellor of the Exchequer becomes merely a clerk who pays the bill, a condition most demoralising to the Premier, or else he becomes the real ruler of the country, though a ruler who has no clear and. well-defined responsibility.
It must not be supposed that, though we have written as above, and though we believe very strongly in the importance of the principles stated, we desire our readers to jump to the conclusion that we think the present Chancellor of the Exchequer should at once become Prime Minister. We hold no such view, and. though we are among those who are firm believers in the ability and patriotic zeal of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, we have no desire to suggest that if the Cabinet cannot rule the Member for Bristol West, the Member for Bristol West should rule the Cabinet. We have adopted a bad system, but for the present, at any rate, we must continue to live under it. Our only practical suggestion is that, if and when the Cabinet comes to be reconstructed on the retirement of Lord Salisbury, the principles we have endeavoured to state shall be observed. To put the matter in a concrete form, we trust that if Mr. Balfour becomes Premier, as we make no doubt he will, he will hold that position like Pitt, Peel, and Gladstone before him,—i.e., as a First Lord of the Treasury who exercises- a direct and personal control in Treasury matters. • If he does, we shall no longer have a Treasury imperium in imperio. The man who pays the piper will visibly call the tune. Or, to put it the other way, the man who calls the tune will be able to see that the piper plays it, for he will be the paymaster. Unless we are very greatly mistaken, the obtaining of a sound, efficient, reasonable, and consistent conduct of public affairs is essentially bound_ up with the recognition of the inevitable power of the purse, and the consequent admission that he who holds the purse- strings must also be chief ruler, and bear the ultimate responsibility in all matters of high policy. There will be two Kings in the Brentford Cabinet as long as the Prime Minister is not in fact as well as in name First Lord of the Treasury.
Previous page
