MINISTERS' WORK.
THE Whitsuntide holiday in the Commons has been short, and we hope the Ministers have enjoyed their momentary rest, for they are becoming a very miserable class of men. Most of them elderly, and nearly all middle-aged, they are compelled to toil harder every year for rewards which every year grow less and less. The daily work which they ought to do, and in some fashion must do, is sufficient to occupy their whole time, and is as hard at least as that of any professionals', except, perhaps, the banisters who are also Members of Parliament. Ministers must attend at their offices, must pass decisions, must read papers with an eye to giving effective orders,—and there is no more exhausting labour ; it is equal to that of University Examiners,—must see important visitors who come intending to worry, must glance through endless letters, must prepare speeches, must, above all, order and under- stand scores of answers to questions on all manner of details about which they can personally know nothing. They must receive "deputations," usually convinced that their business is the pivot on which the world turns ; must discuss with colleagues who are resisting their plans ; must attend Cabinet Councils, where, if discussion is not exhausting—for men of the world talk quick —strength is tried by the responsibility of final decisions. Ministers are not wood, any more than Judges are, and Judges feel the responsibility of their sentences often to a trying
degree. Moreover, most of these causes of labour rapidly in- crease. New statutes every year impose new labours on the Departments. The public demand perpetually—as last week, of the Foreign Office, and this week of the Home Office—new and wearying services. Subordinates grow more and more anxious for clear orders from head-quarters, lest their " responsibility " should become too great. The mass of letters, the pressure of suggestions, the number of answers in Parliament, grow continually larger and larger. The work never ends, and is never fully overtaken ; and that terrible nerve-strain which comes from a continuous sense of hurry, so jades Ministers that special health, health as of men without a weak place, is becoming an indispensable qualification for political success. Lord Chatham could no longer govern, or Lord Althorp rise to Cabinet rank. Men with Prince Bismarck's constitution and habits would die here or go mad ; and a man like the last Foreign Minister of France, M. Challemel- Lacour, a man of splendid powers and bad temper, would kill somebody in order to be done with it. Then, when the work is over, that far more irksome duty, the defence of the work, begins. Day after day, from four in the afternoon to one next morning, nine hours, a long workman's day, the Minister is expected to be in his place in Parliament, to listen unmoved to venomous attacks and inane defences, to join in the excitements of a great debate, from which men come as they come from a battle-field, limp with the expenditure of energy ; or still worse, to bear hours of senseless twaddle, intended, not to advance, but to delay the machine. Preached to death by wild onrates ! What is the provocation of an hour under the most immature Levite who ever talked nonsense from a pulpit, to eight hours under Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, Baron de Worms, Mr. Chaplin, and their congeners, who now presume to explain the foreign policy of the great Conservative party ? At least the curate does not scratch individuals, and the Ministry are scratched incessantly. The preparation of insult has become a political trade. Hardly any temper can pass unwounded through an interpellation such as is now flung night after night at some Minister or other, by some Member or other who for the nonce has ex- changed the club or the rapier of the debater for the bravo's dirk of the Parliamentary questioner. They say— we do not know if the gossip be true or, not, but it might be true any night—that Lord Granville's refusal to answer that question about Turkish troops, a refusal which set all tongues wagging, was due neither to guile nor to inattention, but to simple wrath. His is the best trained temper in the Peers, subdued by a life of diplomacy, sweetened by consciousness of the power of repartee ; but the implied hint, four times re- peated, that he was telling lies, was too much to be endured. The insult is now endless ; and the Ministers, who have entered the House as weary men, quit it, after a second day's labour piled on the top of the first, exhausted, jaded, harassed, almost broken. Even Irish spite, which goes to the centre and the sky, as limitless as a freeholder's claim, might be soothed by their condition.
And what is the reward ? Of direct pay there may be said to be scarcely any. Ministers' allowances hardly keep poor men amid the increasing costliness of London life ; and though they are pleasant to the rich as extra incomes which can be wasted without blame—and the money we can waste is the money which is sweet—the rich think little about them. Per- quisites as political rewards are not only dead, but accounted shameful ; and the statesman who made a fortune as Lord Holland did, would be scouted from society. Salaries, though not often lowered, just now distinctly decrease in value ; while pensions, which are most valuable, and are valued, are so few, that their absence amounts almost to a positive injustice. Moreover, pensions of all kinds are getting tainted by the dislike which, both in America and England, the democracy betrays towards them. It is not pleasant to eat grudged bread, even if you have earned it ; and some day or other they will be wholly swept away. Patronage, which was valued more than money, has almost disappeared. It was pleasant to be a Minister when you could give your friends pensions, and your relatives sinecures, and your enemies "grati- fications," and " make " a family you liked by a signature, or open to the young man you were interested in the quickest and brightest of careers. But there are no pensions now except the doles given for a life of labour, lest a useful State servant should starve ; the sinecures have been swept away with unwise com- pleteness—for some of them might have been used to attract impecunious ability to the State—and profitable patronage may he said to have ceased to exist. No Minister has a safe borough left, or a " place " where the placeman may be a boy, or a bit of work to be done which can be given to the inexperienced. The newspapers, if he did such a thing, would tear his flesh from his bones. Even Mr. Disraeli, who did it, hardly escaped with his life. Popular patronage, the right of bringing men into the services, the patronage which made a Minister a kind of Providence to his district, as Mr. Dundas was once a Providence to all Scotland, has entirely disappeared—or rather, has passed to the grbat "crammers " who have learned the secret of quick teaching—and only the dignifying patronage remains. A Minister can raise a man to comparatively digni- fied position ; but the power is no longer a reward. The Minister is no longer free. That impalpable atmosphere called Opinion fetters him, and reduces the scope of his action till, except in rare cases, he can give nothing as he pleases. He seems to give, and sometimes claims gratitude for giving ; but he must choose the man marked out by opinion or "influences," or very often circumstances, and not the man whom he would like himself to raise. Sir R. Peel said he never made the Bishop he wanted ; and though Lord Palmerston, with his tough mental hide, did in part emancipate himself from this tyranny, Mr. Gladstone would hardly class his power of giving —whether it were giving offices, or posts, or titles—among the pleasant privileges of his life. Patronage belongs to the heads of the great businesses, not to the head of the State. As to the greatest and noblest reward of all, Power, it is not so much disappearing as becoming transmuted from a reward into a new form of labour. If a Minister can win the multitude, if he can convince or defy the educated, if he can resist the horrible solvent criticism of the day, which dissolves pearls as well aa nodules of mud, if he can persuade seven colleagues, and if, when all that is done, he can fight his measure for months through Parliament, he may at the end enjoy the satisfaction that he has done something, has used his initiative successfully, has tasted a little of the sweet of being great. That sweet, however, is no longer the sweet of gratified free volition, but only the sweet that comes from successful but most harassing labour. To have the right of persuading first a committee, then a jealous public meeting, and then seven millions of people more or less unreceptive, is not Power as men understood it when they wrote that draughts of it, like draughts of the ocean, made the drinkers mad. Nobody will be maddened in our day by the " delights " of Power, unless, indeed, the Power takes the form of immense and unexpected command of money. That does madden con- stantly still,—no fewer than four authentic cases having come before the writer in one week.
We shall be told that the competition for Cabinet office is as sharp as it ever was, or sharper, as new roads to it are opened. And that is, of course, quite true. Politics enchain men who hope nothing from them ; distinction is always pleasant, and high office gives to most men—not quite to all— distinction ; and the right to advise a nation will be sought by the able to the end of time. " Hujus pars magna fui " will remain the most attractive of man's internal boasts. The great Romans strove for the purple, though they knew that Emperors always died by the sword; and great Englishmen would accept Cabinet office, though all Ministers died of exhaustion or heartbreak, or explosions of dynamite. The evil result of existing tendencies will not be seen in the decrease of candi- dates for office—though here and there a great noble or a refined politician who might be invaluable will reject office with something of American disdain, unable to bear the drudgery or the shower of vitriolic insult—but in a decrease in the utility of those who hold it. Overworked men will not advise so well as those whose minds are free. Overworked men will be nervous—we do not mean timid— when they should be calmly strong. Overworked men will feel the pressure of opinion pressing on every pore of overheated mental skins, when they should coolly set it down as the clamour of the foolish few. Above all, overworked men will not be ready to originate, for they will not be ready to pile new work upon themselves. It is not in human nature for a Chancellor of the Exchequer worked as ours is to want to suggest, say, a decimal coinage the working out of which would of itself occupy one man's time. The total aid which the nation derives from the reservoir of mental force called the Cabinet is reduced by the incessant demands upon Ministerial strength, and by the consequent lassitude which disables them from cutting through the obstacles now presented to legisla- tion. This is a great evil ; and though we can see no remedy even in the distance—unless one is to be found in the Prussian system of the Adlatus—it is well that the country should
recognise that the evil is real, and that the head of a depart- ment may be taxed till he is rather a machine than a man. Work Cabinet Ministers two hours more a day, or extend the Parliamentary session by a month a year, and the Cabinet will be as useless as if its members were all automata.
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