control over local government, education, public health, pauperism, housing, and a wide variety of other social and industrial

matters.

A second general group of powers pertains to legislation. Technically, all legislative authority is vested in "the king in Parliament," which means the king acting in collaboration with the two houses. Parliament transacts business only during the pleasure of the crown. The crown summons and prorogues the houses, and it can at any time dissolve the House of Commons. No parliamentary act, furthermore, is valid without the crown's assent.

It is, none the less, on the legislative, rather than the executive, side that the greatest losses of the crown have been suffered. There was a time, before the rise of Parliament, when the crown possessed practically unlimited law-making power. As Parliament gradually gathered strength, the legislative self-sufficiency of the crown was undermined. For a long time after the general principle of parliamentary control over legislation was established, the crown clung to the right of issuing proclamations and ordinances with the force of law. But after the Tudor period, even this prerogative had to be given up. Nowadays the crown has, apart from Parliament, no inherent legislative power whatever, save in the crown colonies.1 It cannot independently suspend or dispense with laws; it cannot alter them in the slightest particular; it is practically obliged to approve and accept every law passed by Parliament; 2 and it cannot itself make law. It is true that great numbers of ordinances "orders in council" continue to be promulgated. But these involve no infraction of the general rule. Orders in council are of two kinds. The first is orders which are in the nature of administrative rules or instructions, pretreaties involving (as did the treaty of Paris in 1783) cessions of territory were handled in this manner. It is therefore noteworthy that the treaty with Germany drawn up at Paris in 1919 was laid before Parliament in its entirety, and that only after being explained, debated, and voted upon there was the king's signature attached and ratification notified to the world. There is a strong presumption that Parliament's control over treaty-making has thus been permanently augmented. Cf. p. 80 below.

H. Jenkyns, British Rule and Jurisdiction Beyond the Seas (Oxford, 1902), 4-6, 95.

The power to withhold assent from a measure passed by Parliament has not been exercised since 1707, when Queen Anne vetoed a bill for settling the militia in Scotland. Under the cabinet system of government there is no need of a formal veto power, and it is a debatable question whether this prerogative may not be regarded as having been extinguished by disuse. But see Lowell, Government of England, I, 26, and "Auditor Tantum,' 'The Veto of the Crown," in Fortn. Rev., Sept., 1913.

39 66

scribing in detail the methods by which the government's business shall be carried on. A good example is afforded by the inland revenue regulations, or the rules governing examinations for the civil service. These orders, being mere administrative regulations and not laws, can be, and are, promulgated by the crown independently. The second kind of orders comprises such as have the character of true law. These, also, are promulgated by the crown, to be entirely accurate, by the crown in council - but only by virtue of authority expressly conferred by Parliament. Accordingly, they are known as "statutory orders." Some of these orders take effect at once and are later reported to Parliament merely as a matter of form; others are suspended for a period to allow Parliament an opportunity to disallow them if it chooses. In any event, they partake of the character of legislation — “a species of subordinate legislation," Lowell terms them. But the point is that in issuing them the crown acts entirely by delegated, not inherent, authority.

CHAPTER VI

THE MINISTERS AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM

Composition of the Ministry. It has been made clear that the vast and growing powers of the crown are no longer wielded by the sovereign in person. Rather, they are exercised by ministers whom he does not choose (except in form) and over whose acts he has no positive control. The ministry therefore becomes the actual working executive, or at all events the directing and controlling part of the executive; and as such it includes the heads of all principal departments, some or all of the members of various boards, a considerable group of undersecretaries (assistant secretaries, we should call them in the United States 1), certain party "whips," a few officers of the royal household, and some dignitaries who really have little or no administrative work to perform. Nominally they are selected and appointed by the king; but actually they owe their positions to the chief, or "prime," minister, whose highly important functions will be described presently. The thing that chiefly distinguishes a minister from any other member of the executive service is his direct responsibility to Parliament; and the ministry may be defined as the group of higher executive officials who are obligated by rigorous custom to resign office if Parliament (strictly speaking, the House of Commons) deliberately withholds approval of their policy. The ministers may therefore be said to have a political character not possessed by the mass of the executive and administrative officers, who belong rather to the permanent civil service and are not affected in their tenure by the ups and downs of party politics. The number of ministers in the years immediately preceding the Great War fluctuated around sixty. Approximately one third of them formed the inner circle known as the cabinet, whose importance is such that it will be dealt with at length in a succeeding chapter. During the war period many new ministries were created, and although

1 The term "under-secretary" has, however, been introduced in this country. An Under-Secretary of State was provided for by act of Congress in 1919.

some have already been abolished, it is probable that the group will become permanently from a fourth to a third larger than in 1914.1

As is true in all governments, the work of administration is directed and carried on mainly in certain great executive departments; and most of the ministers - although with some very important exceptions are in charge of, or otherwise attached to, these departments. In the United States, the ten executive departments of the federal government stand on a common footing and bear much resemblance one to another. All have been created by act of Congress; all are presided over by officials known as secretaries; all stand in substantially the same relation to the president and to Congress. The executive departments in most continental governments likewise present a generally logical and symmetrical appearance.2 The English departments, however, are very heterogeneous. In practically all cases, it is true, they are actually presided over by a single responsible minister, assisted by one or more under-secretaries and by a greater or lesser body of non-political officials who carry on the routine work and whose tenure is not affected by the political fortunes of their chiefs. But some of the departments, notably the Treasury and the Admiralty, represent survivals of the great offices of state of earlier centuries; six, i.e., Foreign Affairs, Home Affairs, War, Colonies, India, and Air, are offshoots of the ancient "secretariat of state"; some, as the Board of Trade and the Board of Education, have sprung from committees of the Privy Council; still others are ministries, boards, or commissions established outright in recent decades, such as the Board of Works and the Board of Agriculture of a generation ago and the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Transport created at the close of the Great War. There is no less diversity of organization than of origins, and no description can be undertaken save of the principal departments one by one.3

The Treasury. The oldest department, the one that exercises largest control over the others, and by far the most. important of them all, is the Treasury. The origins of the Treasury are to be sought in the Exchequer, or revenue office, of the Norman kings, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gradually passed into the hands of a special official, the

1 See p. 86.

2 On the French executive departments see p. 400.

3A convenient outline of the administrative system is R. H. Gretton, The King's Government; a Study of the Growth of the Central Administration (London,

Treasurer, later designated the Lord High Treasurer.1 By Tudor times, the Lord Treasurer was a very powerful official, and in 1612 James I tried the experiment of putting the office "in commission "; that is, he bestowed it, not upon an individual, but upon a board of Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury, with, however, a certain primacy in the "First Lord." The last Lord High Treasurer was appointed by Queen Anne, in her expiring moments, in 1714; and from that date the office has continuously been in commission. The duties connected with it are assigned to a Treasury Board of five members, and even the title of Lord High Treasurer has become extinct. For a time the sovereign attended meetings of the Board, but George III abandoned the practice, and control passed into the hands of the First Lord, who was usually also the prime minister.

The nineteenth century brought farther important developments. After 1825 the Board gradually ceased to transact business in a collective capacity, and nowadays it never meets. In 1849 an act of Parliament provided that documents, including requisitions for money, issuing from the Treasury should be regarded as valid if signed by any two of the five Lords. Furthermore, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, an official (dating from the thirteenth century) who had been gradually gaining in importance, now rose to second rank nominally, and first rank actually, in the department. To-day, therefore, the situation is substantially this. The First Lord, the nominal head, is, as a rule, the premier. He has actual control over several outlying departments which have no political chiefs of their own, but only such control over financial work as his general responsibilities as head of the Government of the day entail. The Chancellor of the Exchequer draws up the annual budget, embodying a statement of the proposed expenditures of the year and a program of taxation calculated to produce the requisite revenue, and performs other important functions of the Treasury, being also, as a rule, the Government leader in the House of Commons if the prime minister is in the House of Lords or unable to act. Curiously enough, however, he is no longer in charge of the Exchequer. Rather, the Exchequer and Audit Department, which directly supervises the collection of

1 The workings of the early Exchequer are described in the Dialogus Scaccario ("Dialogue of the Exchequer "), written by Bishop Richard of London in the twelfth century. There is an edition of this treatise by A. Hughes, C. G. Crump, and C. Johnson (Oxford, 1902). The standard history is T. Madox, History and Antiquities of the Exchequer (London, 1711).