been placed.1 The growth of the number of departments and ministerial offices in the past half-century has, of course, augmented the task of supervision; and the difficulty is still farther increased when the premier chooses, as did Lord Salisbury (who was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, as well as premier, from 1887 to 1892 and from 1895 to 1900), to take an important executive department for himself. On the other hand, the premier's supervisory function tends to be diminished, as Palmerston once lamented,2 in times when the departments are in the hands of conspicuously able men.

The prime minister is, furthermore, the link between the cabinet and, on the one hand, the crown, and, on the other, Parliament. On behalf of the cabinet he advises with the sovereign, communicating full information concerning ministerial acts and synopses of the daily debates in Parliament. In the house of which he is a member he represents the cabinet as a whole, makes such statements as are necessary concerning general aspects of the Government's policy, and speaks, as a rule, upon every general or important projected piece of legislation. A premier who belongs to the House of Commons is, of course, more advantageously situated than one who sits in the House of Lords. The latter must trust a lieutenant to represent him and carry out his instructions in the place where the great legislative battles are fought; and this lieutenant, the Government leader in the House, tends strongly to draw into his own hands. a part of the authority belonging to the cabinet's official head. During Lord Salisbury's tenure of the premiership this difficulty was largely obviated by the fact that the Government leader in the lower chamber was the premier's own nephew, Mr. Balfour. But, as Gladstone once wrote, "the overweight of the House of Commons is apt, other things being equal, to bring its leader inconveniently near in power to a prime minister who is a peer. During the decade preceding the Great War the prime minister drew fresh importance from his position as president of both

"3

Inasmuch as the cabinet is historically and legally only a committee of the Privy Council, it would simplify matters, as Low points out (Governance of England, 155), if the Lord President of the Council were also the prime minister; and in 1894 Lord Rosebery, upon assuming the premiership, took for himself the Lord President's titular position. Usage, however, has not developed on these lines; and a practical obstacle is the strong tradition that the Lord President shall be a member of the upper house. In France and other continental countries the premier is officially president of the council of ministers. The same is true in the British self-governing colonies.

2 E. Ashley, Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, II, 257.

3 Gleanings of Past Years (New York, 1878), I, 242.

the Imperial Conference and the cabinet committee on imperial defense; and it is hardly necessary to add that the extraordinary demands of war time gave him, at least for the time being, new leadership and an unprecedented measure of independent authority.2

The Cabinet's Central Position. In the English governmental system the cabinet is in every sense the keystone of the arch. Its functions are both executive and legislative, and indeed, to employ the expressive figure of Bagehot, it is the hyphen that joins, the buckle that binds, the executive and the legislative departments together. As has been pointed out, the uses of the sovereign are by no means wholly ornamental. None the less, the actual executive is the cabinet. It is within the cabinet circle that executive and administrative policies are decided upon, and it is the cabinet ministers and their subordinates in the several departments that carry these policies, and the laws of the land generally, into effect. On the other side, the cabinet members not only occupy seats in one or the other of the two houses of Parliament; they direct, individually and collectively, almost the entire work of legislation. Theyprimarily the 'prime minister - prepare the Speech from the Throne, in which at the opening of a parliamentary session the state of the country is reviewed and a program of legislation is outlined. They formulate, introduce, explain, and advocate needful legislative measures upon all manner of subjects; and although bills may be submitted in either house by non-ministerial members, it has become an unwritten rule that measures of large importance will receive the serious attention of the houses only if they emanate from, or at all events have the active support of, the cabinet. Statistics show that measures introduced by private members have little chance of being passed, especially if they deal with large or controversial matters.1

In effect, the cabinet forms a parliamentary committee chosen, as Bagehot bluntly puts it, to rule the nation. If a cabinet group does not represent the ideas and purposes of Parliament as a whole, it at least represents the ideas of the majority of the dominant chamber; and that is sufficient to give it, during its tenure of office, a thorough command of the situation. The

1 See p. 108.

On the premiership see Low, Governance, Chap. ix. A valuable study is M. Sibert, Étude sur le premier ministre en Angleterre depuis ses origines jusqu'à l'époque contemporaine (Paris, 1909).

English Constitution (new ed.), 79.

See p. 179.

basal fact of the political system is rule by party majority, and within the party majority the power that governs is the cabinet. "The machinery," says Lowell," is one of wheels within wheels; the outside ring consisting of the party that has a majority in the House of Commons; the next ring being the ministry, which contains the men who are most active within that party; and the smallest of all being the cabinet, containing the real leaders or chiefs. By this means is secured that unity of party action which depends upon placing the directing power in the hands of a body small enough to agree, and influential enough to control." 1

The War Cabinet, 1916-19. —It goes without saying that the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 brought upon the cabinet, as upon all parts of the governmental system, an unexpected and fearful strain. By degrees the national administration was transformed almost beyond recognition. New duties fell to the old departments, entailing the creation of new divisions and sections and an enormous increase in the number of officials and the size of the staffs employed. New governmental agencies sprang up on all sides, including the war trade department, the ministry of munitions, and the board of control for the liquor traffic in 1915, the ministries of food control, shipping control, pensions, labor, and blockade in 1916, and the departments of national service and reconstruction in 1917. But more remarkable still were the changes wrought in the composition and functioning of the cabinet.

The first important step toward cabinet reconstruction was

1 Government of England, I, 56. For farther consideration of the cabinet, see Chap. xi below. The best discussion of the organization, functions, and relationships of the cabinet is Lowell, op. cit., I, Chaps. ii-iii, xvii–xviii, xxii-xxiii. Other good general accounts are Low, Governance of England, Chaps. ii-iv, viii-ix; Moran, English Government, Chaps. iv-ix; Anson, Law and Custom of the Constitution, II, Pt. i, Chap. ii; Maitland, Constitutional History of England, 387-430, and Dupriez, Les ministres, I, 36–138. A detailed and still valuable survey is Todd, Parliamentary Government, Parts iii-iv. A brilliant study is Bagehot, English Constitution, especially Chaps. i, vi-ix. The growth of the cabinet is well described in Blauvelt, Development of Cabinet Government in England; and two monographs of value are P. le Vasseur, Le cabinet britannique sous la reine Victoria (Paris, 1902), and W. Evans-Gordon, The Cabinet and War (London, 1904). Authoritative and interesting discussions are to be found in Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, I; Lord Rosebery, Robert Peel (London, 1899); J. Morley, Walpole (London, 1899); ibid., Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1903), II-III. A. West, "No. 10 Downing Street" in Cornhill Mag., Jan., 1904; "Editor," Cabinet Government," in Edinb. Rev., Oct., 1915; and A. V. Dicey, "Comparison between Cabinet Government and Presidential Government," in Nineteenth Cent., Jan., 1919, are informing articles. For an extended bibliography, see Select List of Books on the Cabinets of England and America (Washington, 1903), compiled in the Library of Congress under the direction of A. P. C. Griffin.

the formation, in 1915, of a "coalition" cabinet, which got away from the usual party basis and brought together representatives of all parties, who undertook to sink their differences in a common leadership of the nation in its great crisis. The coalition served many useful purposes. But experience showed that a cabinet of twenty-three members, whatever might be said for it in times of peace, was not adapted to the expeditious and successful management of a nation's affairs in time of war. The upshot was a drastic and somewhat spectacular reorganization in December, 1916, which resulted in the displacement of the large coalition cabinet by a "war-cabinet " of five members. Naturally, the coalition principle was maintained, and the new cabinet - consisting of Mr. Lloyd George, the prime minister; Lord Curzon, President of the Council; Lord Milner and Mr. Henderson, ministers without portfolio; and Mr. Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Government leader in the House of Commons was composed of one Liberal, one Labor member, and three Unionists.

From as far back as 1904 there had been a cabinet committee on imperial defense, and in 1915-16 this body, renamed the "war committee," was several times reorganized. It rendered valuable service, and its recommendations were practically certain to be adopted by the cabinet. But, starting with five or six members, it grew to be almost as large as the cabinet itself; and the action taken in December, 1916, was intended to restore deliberation upon military policy to a small, workable group. It was intended also to vest this critically important function in a body which should have the power to act upon its own decisions, and withal upon a body composed of men who should not be obliged to formulate great policies amidst the distractions of administrative and parliamentary duties. Hence the decision to merge the war committee in a new sort of cabinet - a cabinet of five members, of whom only one should hold an important administrative office. The prime minister was to relinquish his personal leadership in the House of Commons, in order to give his entire time to the general problems of the war.

Under this plan the organic separation of powers which really is present in the English system of government became a personal separation also.2 Parliament considered and passed legislative

1 This committee, indeed, was reorganized in the year mentioned from a "committee on national defense" first appointed in 1895. H. E. Egerton, "The Committee of Imperial Defense," in Polit. Quar., Feb., 1915.

* See p. 56.

and fiscal measures in the absence of all, or practically all, of the cabinet officers even though there never was a time when the actions of the houses were so completely dictated by the cabinet. The cabinet confined itself substantially to determination of policy relating to the conduct of the war, and to the exercise of broad executive powers, which it wielded with a minimum of restraint from Parliament. The work of administration was carried on by ministers and boards that, standing quite outside of the cabinet, had no direct voice in the framing of either executive or legislative policy. It was mainly because of this new isolation of each part of the government from the other parts that the arrangements for cabinet records and communications already referred to were introduced.1 A secretariat was organized; minutes were systematically kept; and full information was promptly sent to every minister who was affected by a decision reached. Furthermore, the practice of admitting ministers and other outsiders to a share in the discussions was early adopted; and publicity of a sort never before known was provided for through the publication of annual cabinet reports.2

With its membership increased to six, and with occasional changes in personnel, the war cabinet continued at the head of the government throughout the remainder of the conflict and for almost a year after the armistice. Furthermore, in 1917 the prime ministers of the five self-governing colonies, together with representatives of India, were invited to attend a series of special meetings of the body, held in conjunction with a new Imperial conference; and thus arose the novel and interesting "Imperial war cabinet," which held two subsequent series of meetings in the summer and autumn of 1918.3 These reconstructions were accomplished by entirely informal and extra-legal processes. Cabinet government in England rests on convention, and can be modified, and even revolutionized, without changes in the law. Hence no act of Parliament was passed, and no proclamation or order in council was issued, establishing, or even announcing, the new machinery. General Smuts, representing the South African Union, sat as a member of the smaller British

1 See p. 102.

2 These reports were printed as parliamentary papers: Report of the War Cabinet for the Year 1917 (Cd. 9005, 1918), and Report of the War Cabinet for 1918 (Cd. 325, 1919).

3 Report of the War Cabinet for 1917, 5-10. On the Imperial conference see Extracts from Minutes of Proceedings and Papers Laid before the Conference [of 1917]. Cd. 8566, 1917. Documentary materials relating to the sessions of 1918 are presented in Cd. 9177, 1918.