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.

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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.

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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

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.

2 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).

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.

war cabinet from the summer of 1917 to the end of 1918, although he was, of course, neither a minister nor a member of Parliament. But again no law was violated; for it is only custom that requires cabinet officers to be members of Parliament.

The war cabinet's methods of work are fully described, not only in its published reports, but in certain speeches of its members on the floor of Parliament.1 The body met every day, often two or three times a day, and hence, for all practical purposes, was in session continuously. Part of the time was given to hearing reports, including a daily summary of the military situation. Part was given to discussion of military policy and of public questions, participated in by the members alone and behind closed doors. But most of the sittings were taken up largely with hearings and discussions, attended and participated in by ministers, military and naval experts, and persons of many sorts and connections who were invited to appear. Thus, if the agenda of the day called for a consideration of diplomatic questions, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, accompanied perhaps by one or more of his under-secretaries or other aids and subordinates, would be likely to be present. "The majority of the sessions of the war cabinet," says the Report for 1917, "consist, therefore, of a series of meetings between members of the war cabinet and those responsible for executive action at which questions of policy concerning those departments are discussed and settled. Questions of overlapping or conflict between departments are determined and the general lines of policy throughout every branch of the administration coördinated so as to form part of a consistent war plan. Ministers have full discretion to bring with them any experts, either from their own departments or from outside, whose advice they consider would be useful." In pursuance of this work of coördination, scores of special committees were set up, consisting usually of the heads of the departments most concerned, under the chairmanship of a member of the war cabinet.3 Finally, it is to be observed that all of the principal ministers were occasionally convoked in a plenum of the cabinet" for the consideration of great public questions such as the Irish situation and the Representation of the People Bill, although even on these matters the final choice of policy lay with the war cabinet.

2

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1 Notably one by Lord Curzon in the House of Lords on June 19, 1918 (Parl. Deb., 5th series, Lords, xxx, 263 ff.).

2 Cd. 9005, 1918, p. 2.

3 For example, the war priorities committee, the economic defense and development committee, the committee on home affairs, and the demobilization committee.

So long as hostilities continued, the war cabinet had, indeed, the powers of an autocrat. It recognized an ultimate responsibility to the House of Commons. But it was practically independent, and it is doubtful whether it could have been overthrown. Parliament, already shorn of real initiative, and heavily depleted by war service, became a mere machine for the registration of executive edicts. After the armistice, however, the situation changed. Criticism of the war cabinet as an arbitrary "junto," long repressed, broke forth; and the new parliament elected in December, 1918, although containing a huge Government majority, showed much independence of spirit. The end of the war cabinet began to be both prophesied and demanded, and the premier himself intimated that such a change was not unlikely to come.1 After the Peace Conference convened at Paris, in January, 1919, only three members of the governing group were left in England; and Mr. Law - who in the absence of Mr. Lloyd George acted as a sort of deputy prime minister, began to summon ministerial conferences attended by twenty or thirty persons, and therefore bearing a strong resemblance to the cabinet of pre-war days. Upon resuming the reins in Downing Street, in midsummer, Mr. Lloyd George made it known that the war cabinet was soon to be superseded; and for some weeks the details of the impending reorganization absorbed much of his thought. The cabinet in its new form had served a useful purpose. But it was not conspicuously successful in coördinating the work of the different departments, and it virtually abrogated the principle of the collective responsibility of the ministers for the acts of the Government. Its abandonment, in its present form at all events, was almost universally desired.

The contemplated reconstruction raised, however, two difficult questions. How large should the reorganized cabinet be made? And should the principle of party solidarity within the cabinet be revived? Even if only the ministers who were heads of departments were brought in, there would be thirty members. But pre-war cabinets had never contained more than twentytwo persons; that number had usually been considered too large; the political history of 1915-16 had vividly demonstrated the disadvantages of a large cabinet; and the Machinery of

1 In announcing the new coalition government formed after the elections he said (January 10, 1919) that the war cabinet would be continued until there should have been " more time to make permanent peace arrangements." London Times, Jan. 11, 1919.