Prime Minister of England

“ But is it not hard upon us while we are labouring, through good and evil report, to thwart the designs of those who would dismember the Empire, that our adversaries should be informed that the difference between them and the Prime Minister of England is only one of time? ”

“ Now, as to this new policy, I will tell the House what I think the Prime Minister should do. He ought, I think, always to choose for his President of the Board of Control or his Secretary of State for India, a man who cannot be excelled by any other man in his Cabinet, or in his party, for capacity, for honesty, for attention to his duties, and for knowledge adapted to the particular office to which he is appointed. If any Prime Minister appoint an inefficient man to such an office, he will be a traitor to the Throne of England. ”

“ It so happened that the prime minister was a member of a great house which had become illustrious by its profession of Protestant principles, and even by its sufferings in a cause which England had once looked on as sacred. The prime minister, a man of distinguished ability, not devoid even of genius, was also a wily politician, and of almost unrivalled experience in the management of political parties. ”

“ In the United States, where the whole people is the fountain of power, the ministers are the servants of the President, appointed and dismissed by him. In England, while they are still in theory her Majesty's ministers, and the Prime Minister is nominally selected by the sovereign, by a remarkable transformation they have become the servants of the legislature—that is, of the people. ”

“ INSTANCES OF SUCCESSFUL AMBITION. In 1805 there was born in London a boy of a hated and branded people. When sixteen years of age he became a clerk in a solicitor’s office, and, to the amusement of his companions, he was wont to say: “I intend to be prime minister of England.” He had no liberal education, yet he won honors of literary skill and scholarship. ”

“ All the European kingdoms, especially that of England, were at this time unacquainted with the office of a prime minister, so well understood at present in all regular monarchies; and the people could form no conception of a man who, though still in the rank of a subject, possessed all the power of a sovereign, eased the prince of the burden of affairs, supplied his want of experience or capacity, and maintained all the rights of the crown, without degrading the greatest nobles by their submission to his temporary authority. ”

“ As the House of Commons is the place where the great battles of the parties are fought, a Prime Minister who is a peer is in something of the position of a commander-in-chief who is not present with the forces in the field. He must send his directions from afar, and trust a lieutenant to carry them out. In such a case the leader of the House of Commons stands in something of the position of a deputy premier. He is, of necessity, constantly consulted by his colleagues in the House, and he can, if so disposed, draw into his own hands a part of the authority belonging to the head of the cabinet. ”

“ The Prime Minister stands between the Crown and the cabinet; for although the King may, and sometimes does, communicate with a minister about the affairs relating to his own department, it is the Premier who acts as the connecting link with the cabinet as a whole, and communicates to him their collective opinion. ”

“ The King’s advice.and, when he is a wise man, he generally finds that the King’s advice on the matter is very well worth listening to. If the King does not approve of what his Prime Minister suggests he can always dismiss him; but it is of no use his doing this unless he can appoint some one else whom the existing House of Commons will follow, or unless he is prepared to dismiss the existing House of Commons and call a new Parliament. The King will do this last if he feels sure that the minister and the existing House are leading the nation astray or are leading it where it doesn’t want to go. ”

“ The history of the progress of parliamentary power in this reign is most important. We find Parliament at various times assorting its authority, calling on the crown to reform its household, its courts of law, to restrain its expenditure, and dismiss its servants. By its means the Duke of Gloucester obtained his commission to regulate the administration, and to impeach the prime minister, the Earl of Suffolk, De la Pole ”

“ As the English Constitution then stood, the Cabinet system Pg 480 was but half developed. The modern idea that the queen's advisers should be a small homogeneous body of men of the same party, meeting together under the presidency of the prime minister, was only just coming into being. It was still a moot point whether, during the sovereign's illness or at his or her death, the executive power lay in the hands of the whole Privy Council or of the members of it alone who were actually ministers and members of the Cabinet. The supporters of the Protestant succession took advantage of this doubt. ”

“ Even revolutions have arisen, in England itself, and several times, from the discontent created by Ministers who were excellent in moments of calm but feeble in serious crises.”
The Journal wrote thus:
“One element dominates the situation. It Is the preponderating position of Mr. Lloyd George. No Prime Minister could govern to-day without asking not so much for his collaboration as for his directions. Lloyd George is the soul of England at war, and the principal combative arm of Great Britain. ”

“ Yet it would be a great error to imagine that our princes merely reign and never govern. In the seventeenth century, both Whigs and Tories thought it, not only the right, but the duty, of the first magistrate to govern. All parties agreed in blaming Charles the Second for not being his own Prime Minister; all parties agreed in praising James for being his own Lord High Admiral; and all parties thought it natural and reasonable that William should be his own Foreign Secretary. ”

“ In simpler speech, England has at length got a Minister of Education who has a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge, and will do his appointed work with a single eye to the intellectual advancement of the country, neither giving heed to the pribbles and prabbles of theological disputants, nor modifying his plans to suit the convenience of the manufacturer or the squire. ”

“ There was now for the first time a prime minister in England, a person who was himself a subject imposing harmonious action on the cabinet. The change was so gradually and silently effected that it is difficult to realize its full importance. So far, indeed, as it only came about through the incapacity of the first two kings of the house of Hanover, it might be undone, and was in fact to a great extent undone by a more active successor. ”

“ As soon as he resigned his premiership, assurances were entered into on the continuance of the new Pitt ministry in power; and when the duke reassumed office, fresh engagements were opened on the chance of his remaining in place. Successes or disasters were all the same to the assurers; the seals of a prime minister, or the life of a highwayman, answered equally the purpose of the policy mongers; and India or Minorca, Warren Hastings or Admiral Byng, were alike to them if they could put money into their purses. ”

“ Titles, places, commissions, pardons, were daily sold in market overt by the great dignitaries of the realm; and every clerk in every department imitated, to the best of his power, the evil example.
During the last century no prime minister, however powerful, has become rich in office; and several prime ministers have impaired their private fortune in sustaining their public character. ”

“ That a difference of opinion, even on an important subject, is not always regarded as a sufficient cause for such a dismissal; that a Prime-minister, especially if conscious of his strength, occasionally consents to retain colleagues who differ from him on some one subject, the same work to which we are partly indebted for our knowledge of the details of this affair—the "Life of the Prince Consort"—furnishes two remarkable instances in which the Prime-minister, then Lord Palmerston himself, submitted to be overruled. ”

“ The King was still expected to have the direction of the executive, to be, in fact, his own Prime Minister, and to nominate as heads of departments such statesmen as he thought Ignorance of the constitutional change. best fitted for the employment, without exact regard to their political views. The effect of this was to make the King responsible for the Government; and though the right of impeachment, as exercised in the case of Danby, rested upon the supposition that ministers were responsible to Parliament, the fact was not yet fully recognized. ”

“ As ignorant of the politics of England as of its language, Walpole selected the King's Ministers and determined the policy of his Government; establishing a precedent which has always been followed. Since that time it has been the duty of the Prime Minister to form the Ministry; and no sovereign since Anne has ever appeared at a Cabinet Council, nor has refused assent to a single Act of Parliament. ”

“ Among our little party were men of different phases of political feeling, but on one point they were all agreed—that England had lost a great minister, and the world one of the most brilliant and original statesmen of the age. ”

“ With the same keenness of insight M. Clemenceau, writing on July 1st, 1917, in L’Homme Enchaîné, saw in Mr. Lloyd George a great political experimentalist adapting his course always to the actual events of the war:
“The English Prime Minister is, above all things, a man of action—one of those who, under the active impulse of living thought, apply themselves to one task only—and that is to bring order and method into the plans and resolves which come to them from a rigorous scrutiny of realities.” ”

“ But the English politician is so far suffused with the spirit of modernity as to prefer the newspaper to the book, to regard more closely registration records than the classics, and generally is wide awake rather than steeped in subtler and profounder forms of sagacity and knowledge. The Prime Minister is a Survival. With all his extraordinary adaptiveness, he stands in many respects in sharpest contrast to his environment. ”

“ For it is a new Britain one sees. Mr. Lloyd George is prime minister of a transformed Britain, a Britain modernized and democratized. Like the Englishman who, when he first witnessed a performance of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” cried out, “How very unlike the home life of our dear Queen!” the American who lunches in Downing Street is inclined to exclaim: “How different from Lord North and Palmerston!” We have, I fear, been too long accustomed to interpret Britain in terms of these two ministers and of what they represented to us of the rule of a George the Third or of an inimical aristocracy. ”

“ It could only be brought about by a strong and persistent lead from those who possessed the ear of the world and the confidence of their own people. Never in the whole course of modern history has there been a more magnificent opportunity than then lay before the British Prime Minister, never has there been a clearer call of plain duty. He was free, as men in public life are seldom free. Great Britain hung on his lips, and Europe was waiting for the lead of Great Britain. ”

“ His circumstances were easy, his fame was assured, and when he went down to Parliament for the first time after he became Prime Minister, the crowds outside cheered him to the echo, the crowds within took up the acclaim, and the House that once had silenced him with derisive mockery, hailed with wild welcome this man who, without money, without birth, without support, had made himself, by force of will, courage, genius, loyalty, and truth, the ruler of the British Empire. ”

“ With his accession to the Premiership the unstable character of the Government ceased. Resting on the King, making himself no more than an instrument of the King's will, and thus commanding the support of all royal influence, from whatever source derived, North was able to bid defiance to all enemies, till the ill effects of such a system of government and of the King's policy became so evident, that the clamour for a really responsible minister grew too loud to be disregarded. ”

“ President, that the conduct of Great Britain would be very different under these different conditions of the people and Government of the United States? Let me ask you this question, sir: would you not, sir, if you were Prime Minister of Great Britain, consulting her interest alone, pursue a very different course of conduct under this different state of things? Let every gentleman put the question to himself ”

“ He became the King's secretary, representing the Government in the House of Commons, and was at once on the high road to power. If we please we may call him ambitious; but an ambitious man would scarcely have pursued so refined a policy, or have calculated on the admiration which he gained by adhering to a fallen minister. He did not seek greatness—greatness rather sought him as the man in England most fit to bear it. His business was to prepare the measures which were to be submitted to Parliament by the Government. ”

“ Add to this that he was the essence of good-nature, the most genial of friends, simple and straight, manly and cheery, and we have some idea of the man whom the nation insisted on having for Prime Minister, when he was over seventy years of age, at a critical moment when it was felt that only a strong, fearless, popular statesman could guide the ship out of the storm. ”

“ We may fairly maintain that the creation and administration of our presidential office have added something to political history, and when we contrast in character and ability the men who have filled it with the monarchs of England and of France, we may have a feeling of just pride. Mr. Bryce makes a suggestive comparison in ability of our Presidents to the prime ministers of England, awarding the palm to the Englishmen,7 and from his large knowledge of both countries and impartial judgment we may readily accept his conclusion. ”