SPOILS OF OFFICE.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 14741, 22 August 1921, Page 2

SPOILS OF OFFICE.

POLITICS AS A PROFESSION. (By Michael MacDonagh.) When Lord Russell was Prime Minister and Frst Lord of the Treasury he publicly declared that no man without a private fortune could hope to fill any of the high offices of the State with freedom from pecuniary worries. "For my part," he said, "I never had debt in my life until I was First Lord of the Treaslry." A Minister was obliged largely to increase his personal expenditure in order to meet the social calls of his office. He must live in a better style as a Member of the Government than as a Member of the Opposition. A large house, servants, and carriages were essential to the adequate fulfilling of his social obligations as a minister. "If I recollect aright," said Lord John Russell to the Select Committee on Official Salaries in 1850, "when Monsieur de Tercy went from France to endeavour to make peace with the Dutch Government, he was very much struck, on calling upon the Grand Pensionary, to find the door opened by a servant-maid, and he thought it showed very great republican. sympathy and no doubt it was very becoming. But I think that if Lorl Palmeiston had only a housemaid to open the door, and Foreign Ministers called there, everybody would say that he was very mean and unfit for his situation." Palmerston was, at the time, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and being a wealthy man, was noted l for his lavish hospitality. In fact, the £5,000 a year which the head of the Foreign Office is paid does not always cover the cost of living, and the social entertainments which he has annually to give. In addition to maintaining a position of great dignity in a becoming manner, he is expected regularly to entertain at his own expense the members of the various foreign diplomatic missions in London. Lord Rosehery has said that when he was Foreign Secretary in 1893 he spent half his year's salary upon two receptions at the Foreign Office. THE G.O.M.'s SALARY.

Gladstone, like Lord John Russell, lived well in office and simply in opposition. On his appointment as Prime Minister for the first time in 1868 he took a house in that region of the rich and fashionable, Carlton House Terrace. After his defeat in the General Election of 1875 he wrote to his wife saying that they must retrench their expenliture. "The truth is," he said, "that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been better housed than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House Terrace, I think you would not find anyone with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with much more." His official salary was but £5,000, and when it was stopped he retired to Harley Street. During his two other terms of office as Prime Minister he inhabited the official house in Downing Street. Gladstone had a passion for public economy. He even grudged the spending of a small sum of money to make bright with flowers the little garden at the back of No. 10 Downing Street, so eager was his desire to limit the demands on the National Excheaquer. But he always considered that he had well earned his allowance as Minister. Mr. John Bright, it seems, had a compunctious visiting of shame every time that the quarterly cheque for his official salary arrived, and once he disclosed his feelings to Gladstone. "There I don't agree with you, Bright," said Gladstone. "I'd rather take my official money than anything I receive from land, for I know I'have earned every penny of it." I

, TO COMBAT CORRUPTION. The emoluments of office were an important consideration to some of the greatest men in political history. Burke, Pitt, Sheridan, Perceval and Canning had no hereditary fortunes, and if there were not adequate salaries attached to office they could not have given their great abilities to the service of the country in government and administration. Edmund Burke, whose movement for ecomomic reform in the conduct of State affairs lea to the' abolition of many political sinecures, insisted, nevertheless, that reasonable emoluments should be paid to Ministers. He said:

"I will even go so far as to affirm that if men are willing to serve in such situations without salary, they ought not to be permitted to do it. Ordinary service must be secured by the motives to ordinary integrity. I do not hesitate to say that the State which lay its foundation in rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its superstruction i.i the basest proflgacy and corruption. An honourable and fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity, as in all things else a lawful and regulated enjoyment is the best security against debauchery and excess." Moreover, if the salaries of office were meagre, statesmanship would become entirely an appendage of wealth. In former times most of the highest offices of the Government were filled by territorial magnates, Whig or Tory—members of aristocratic families with ample private means as well as great traditions of public service. To these men, possessed of personal fortunes of £15.000, £20,000 or £40,000 a year, the salaries of office may have been regarded as unconsidered trifles. And yet, strangely enough, in the seventeenth century, when rich noblemen, their relatives and dependents were at the head of affairs, the political seems to have been quite a lucrative profession, for a Minister often held his majority in the House of Commons together, not so much by principles, as by places and pensions.

THE PASSING OF THE "RULING CLASSES." ' But the old custom of confining the highest of the Offices of State exclusively to men of hereditary position and wealth and leisure came to an end by the middle of the nineteenth century. The tendency to open the area of statesmanship to all members of the party in power of proved ability and distinction, irrespective of birth or rank or fortune, was strikingly shown in the Administration which Sir Henry CampbellBannermon formed in 1905, when John Burns, a manual worker from an engineering shipyard l , was made President of the Local Government Board and a Cabinet Minister; and

as this tendency is bound to become wider and -wider still as time progresses, the salaries of Ministers must be at least sufficient to provide a livelihood in order to attract to the service of the State men well equippedg for it in intellectual ability, and experience in affairs, but without private means.

The fact, however, remains that the emoluments of office are not the allurement of the public service, and they never can be in any conceivable circumstances under the Party system, and the frequent changes of Government which it involves. Those who make politics a calling are very few in number. As a rule, men do not enter upon political career with the object of making fortunes as statesmen or even of securing a livelihood, in the' way that men study medicine to become doctors, or law to become barristers. The uncertainty of attaining office and, in the event of the success, the precariousness and brevity of its tenure, will always make statesmanship the most unreliable of calling in the • eyes of those bent on having a good balance at their banker's.. The emolument of office are really not so much salaries as prizes.

If two young men of equal mental endowment were to set out on the same day to make their way in the world, one going into commerce or the professions, and the other into politics, it is almost a certainty that when the time came for the retirement 'the man who had selected a professional or business vocation, was successful, would be ten times as wealthy, at the very least, as the man who gave himself to the service of the State, even though he had attained the most renowned and exalted -office of Prime Minister. Members of Parliament are. as a rule, engaged in commercial and professional occupations, and they follow politics as a concurrent career. The few who show a special aptitude for leadership and office ultimately reach the Treasury Bench, b:it they hold on. nevertheless, to the established and secure position on which they continue to depend for their bread and butter.