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without attracting attention, supplies the technical knowledge, and largely directs the conduct of his chief, extends throughout the English Government from the Treasury Bench to the Borough Council."*

This article is concerned, however, only with one particular illustration of a general law with the relations which subsist between Westminster and Whitehall. Those relations are intimate, curious and significant. To the denizens of Whitehall the sojourners in Westminster are wont to go for every kind of miscellaneous information. Whitehall, in its omniscience, is wont to supply the information, or so much as it deems proper to reveal, to the inquisitive legislator or his constituents; although no body of men are more skilled than our permanent officials in that ostentation of candour which, when combined with courtesy, is so well calculated to disarm criticism if not to satisfy curiosity. Whitehall maintains communications with Westminster mainly in two ways: indirectly, through those urbane instruments of transmission-the Parliamentary Ministers who convey to enquiring legislators so much of the information supplied to them in Whitehall as they can remember or cannot conveniently forget; directly, by means of the examination of the chief departmental officials before Select Committees. Considerable experience of the latter method has, be it observed in passing, led the present writer to form a very high opinion of the skill and devotion, the conspicuous ability and the immense knowledge, exhibited by the great majority of those permanent heads of departments who are summoned, from time to time, to give evidence before Select Committees of the House of Commons.

Yet the English Civil Service still awaits a chronicler; the epic of Whitehall is still unsung. In view of the ample leisure enjoyed by so many ex-civil servants, and their high qualifications for the task, this may be deemed surprising. But, if surprising, it is also highly characteristic. Happy, it has been said, is the country that has no history. The annals of the Civil Service are, indeed, very brief as compared with those of Parliament, and they are almost wholly devoid of the dramatic interest—the historic debates, the momentous announcements, the quick transitions, the sudden turns of fortune, the clash and interplay of personal

*A. Lawrence Lowell," The Government of England," I., p. 176.

forces-which redeem parliamentary history and parliamentary life from any chance of permanent monotony or continuous boredom. Nevertheless the literary perspective is curiously distorted.

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That the High Court of Parliament should have supplied the theme of innumerable treatises in many languages is in itself natural and proper, since parliamentary government is the supreme political contribution made by England to the history of civilization. The English were the first among the peoples of the world to solve the central problem of representative government, to reconcile order with liberty, and to devise a method by which the executive government of the State, without sacrificing too much of practical efficiency, could be made almost continuously responsive to the wishes and the will of the governed. The solution has been found in the gradual evolution of the cabinet system—the "hyphen " that unites the legislature and the executive; the "three-fold hinge three-fold hinge" (to adopt Mr. Gladstone's simile) that "connects for action the British constitution of King or Queen, Lords and Commons "; the "stout buffer-spring (in the same statesman's fertile imagery) which "receives all shocks and within which their opposing elements neutralize one another." Well might Gladstone describe the cabinet as perhaps the most curious formation in the political world of modern times"; but it is a formation which most of the States of the modern world have attempted, with varying degrees of success to reproduce on alien soils. The operation of the mainspring of the English constitution has naturally attracted widespread attention alike from political theorists and from all those who are interested in the practical working of political institutions. Nevertheless to foreign commentators the Cabinet remains, like the English constitution as a whole, something of a mystery, mainly because it is based not upon documents, but upon conventions.

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The English parliament and Cabinet then, have received alike from native and foreign critics abundant attention; but the history, the work, and the significance of the Civil Service have been strangely ignored. As Mr. Ramsay Muir says:Read any history of England in the last century, you will gather the impression that the Cabinet and the House of Commons have been the only operative instruments of our Government; you will hear nothing about the permanent officials, everything about the politicians.

That is quite true. Occasional chapters may be found, dealing with the Civil Service, in general works on English government, such as Lawrence Lowell's admirable work already quoted. Mr. R. H. Gretton has written an excellent little book on the " King's Government"; Mr. H. D. Traill's useful volume in the English Citizen Series was revised, some twenty years ago, by the very competent hand of Sir Henry Craik; and one or more monographs on particular offices have lately appeared in the " Whitehall Series," edited by Sir James Marchant. But all these books are on a comparatively small scale and monographic in character; the detailed history of the development of the Civil Service must still be sought in the reports of Royal Commissions, of Departmental and Select Committees and similar publications, the popularity and accessibility of which are by no means commensurate with their intrinsic value.

Of the political chiefs who temporarily preside over the great public departments, nothing will be said in this article. They are mere sojourners in Whitehall: here to-day, gone to-morrow. It is true that during their brief sojourn, they enjoy the dubious advantage of the limelight, and supply copy for the paragraphist. But it is with the permanent denizens of Whitehall and the work of their departments that this article is concerned, and in particular with the relations between Whitehall and Westminster.

Apart from finance and the business of the Treasury, there was no continuous executive government in home affairs until the nineteenth century was well advanced. Of the existing departments much the most ancient is the Treasury-the department of the Lord High Treasurer, an officer dating from the reign of William I, by whom a treasurer was appointed to preside over the king's scaccarium, or exchequer, and in particular to receive the accounts of the sheriffs, who collected the king's revenue locally in their respective shires.

The Treasurer was originally, like most other high officers of State, an officer of the King's Household. Between the " Household" and the "State" there was, indeed, for a long time no distinction. As late as 1737 there is a record of a payment to two under-secretaries and sixteen of their clerks of £1,269 as " board wages during His Majesty's residence at Hampton Court, July 14October 29" ("Calendar Treasury Papers," 1735-8, p. 163). From this entry we may infer that at least down to that date the

staff of the Treasury was fed from the royal kitchen, at the King's expense. An entry in the Pipe Roll of 1155 of a payment " for repairing the house of the Exchequer "makes it clear that as early as the reign of Henry II the Exchequer was separately housed, though the house was then, and for long afterwards, within the precincts of the Royal Palace of Westminster.

Administratively, the Exchequer descends from the Curia Regis of the Norman and Angevin kings, and originally consisted of two offices. One was the Exchequer of Accounts, which gradually developed into one of the three great Courts of Common Law; the other was the Exchequer of Receipt which, if not the ancestor, was at least the predecessor of the modern Treasury. The connection between the two offices was close, the former being mainly concerned with receipts, the latter with disbursements, but gradually bifurcation took place and the legal Exchequer Court was separated from the administrative Treasury. Down to 1875, however, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was entitled to sit as a judge in the Court of Exchequer, and he still sits in the High Court of Justice when on the morrow of St. Martin (November 12) the Sheriffs are appointed for the ensuing year.

This new official, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, first appeared in the time of Henry III when he was appointed to act as an assistant to, or perhaps a check upon, the Treasurer. It was long, however, before the junior official began to rival the senior. In the seventeenth century the two offices were occasionally combined in one person. From the reign of Charles II the Treasurership was with increasing frequency (and since 1714 this has been invariably done) put into commission. With the disappearance of a personal Treasurer, the Chancellor of the Exchequer gained in importance, though his position was again somewhat dwarfed by the evolution of a Prime Minister. The Treasury has, however, always retained its pre-eminence among the public departments, being ultimately responsible (with the Revenue Officers) for the collection of the revenue, as well as for its distribution for spending purposes among the several administrative departments.

The question has been raised whether it can be regarded as a sound principle of administration that the same department should be responsible both for raising the revenue and controlling the expenditure. The answers are far from unanimous. Those

who favour a large increase in the activities and therefore in the expenditure of the State, chafe at Treasury control. They contend that it is the business of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to raise the funds demanded by the collective wisdom of his colleagues, but this view has never yet obtained general acceptance. On the contrary it has been commonly held that it is essential both to efficiency and economy that the minister responsible for raising the revenue should also have a predominant voice in deciding on the amount, and-in some cases on the character, of the expenditure. Only in this way can the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it is held, impose an effective restraint upon the demands of his colleagues, and appreciate the extent of the liabilities to which he is being committed by them. "If he is to be held responsible for filling the reservoir and maintaining a certain depth of water in it, he must also be in a position to regulate the outflow."* The Treasury is not, or should not be, itself a spending department. Its traditional function is to act as a watch-dog, to stand sentinel over the other departments. During the Great War (1914-18) there was necessarily an immense development of governmental activities, and consequently a large number of new departments were brought into existence. Of these the largest was the Ministry of Munitions which, at the date of the Armistice, had a staff of no fewer than 65,142 persons. The ministry had then become, in the words of Dr. Addison," not only the biggest purchasing organization in the world, but also the largest selling and distributing agency." After the Armistice it was reconstituted as the Ministry of Supply and, thanks to the unselfish assistance rendered by certain business men of outstanding administrative capacity, it managed to dispose of an immense accumulation of surplus stores with great advantage to the State. That striking achievement cannot, however, be accepted as an argument in favour of the continuation or renewal of the experiment: it was due to the patriotic co-operation of certain captains of industry, upon whose services the State could count only in a national emergency. The Ministries of Food, of National Service, of Information, of Shipping and of Reconstruction were only a few of the many departments set up during the strenuous years of war. Brought into being, some by the

*Report of the Haldane Committee on the Machinery of Government, Cd. 9230, p. 18.

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