BRITISH STATESMEN

New Zealand Tablet, 24 February 1916, Page 13

BRITISH STATESMEN

SALARIES AND EMOLUMENTS.. ; In view of the attention which has been directed to the necessity for economy, both public and private, in the United Kingdom the following particulars of salaries of Ministers and others will be of interest: , There, are 46 % political posts in the administration, and the aggregate salaries amount to £158,425. Apart from the Lord Chancellor of England r and the English law officers—who are the most highly-paid Ministers the utmost salary which a statesman in office can attain is £SOOO. It is by no means a beggarly allowance. But it is attached only to seven posts in the Government. The emoluments of the other posts range downwards to £IOOO a year. These do not seem extravagant salaries, when we consider that the men who reach the highest place in the service of the State are men of such conspicuous ability that they might well occupy leading places in any other profession they chose to adopt; and also bear in mind the exacting nature and immense responsibility of their duties, and the vastness and wealth of the Empire whose affairs they administer. • The Treasury. The Prime Minister, as such, receives no salary. Some office with nominal duties and a salary—that of First Lord of the Treasury accordingly held, by him. The post of First Lord of the Treasury has long been a sinecure in the departmental sense, no duties being attached to it, but it carries a salary of £SOOO and an official residence at 10 Downing street. It must not be supposed, however, that the Prime Minister has no work to do. As.head of the Government his duties are. most responsible, varied, and laborious, for they mean the general superintendence of every . department and of all important political affairs, domestic, colonial, and foreign. The effective Chief of the Treasury or the department which controls the collection and expenditure of the national revenue, is not the First Lord of the Treasury, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He is a hard-worked Minister, and not often is his task of making ends meet brightened by a glint of popular favor. ' You have held for a long -time' the most unpopular office of the State,' Gladstone wrote to his fallen Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Lowe, who came to grief over a proposal to tax matches in 1879. Gladstone was an authority on the subject, for he had himself filled the office for many years. ' No man can do his duty in that office, and be popular while he holds it,' he added in the same letter of sympathy to his colleague. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has also an official residence, 11 Downing street. He has an assistant called the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who is paid £2OOO. The Whips. There are, besides, three Junior Lords of the Treasury, who have now no association whatever with the department. What, then, do they do for the £IOOO a year each that is paid? Their duties, according to an amusing definition once given by Canning, are—always to be at St. Stephen's, to keep a House, and to cheer the Ministers. They are, in fact, the assistant Whips of the party in office. The Chief Whip also fills a sinecure departmental post, which used to be styled the Patronage Secretary to the Treasury, and has of late years been called the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, which carries a salary of £2OOO. The Constitution knows not the Whip any more than it knows the Prime Minister, and, therefore, the Whip is left free to marshal and keep in order the followers of the Government by being provided with an office to which there ; is a salary but no duty attached. ;,- * ■ v <s "/, .The Secretaries of /State. '■'. •,.'.'*' \y . . , There are five Secretaries of State, who look after Foreign Affairs, Home Affairs, War, India, and the Colonies, and the salary of each is £SOOO. Each is assisted by an Under-Secretary of State, who is paid

£ISOO, and in the case of the War Office there is an additional Minister known as the Financial Secretary, who also gets £ISOO. The First Lord of the Admiralty is paid £4500 a year. Like the Secretary of State for War, he has two subordinates in Parliamentthe Parliamentary and Financial Secretary, whose salary is £2OOO, and the Civil Lord, whose salary is £IOOO. The President of the Board of Education has a salary of £2OOO, and is assisted by a Parliamentary Secretary, who is paid £I2OO. The President of the Board of Agriculture also gets £2OOO, but he has no Parliamentary Secretary. The First Commissioner for Works, who as Chief of the Office of Works performs overseeing duties in connection with Royal Palaces, State buildings, and Royal parks, has £2OOO. The salary of the Postmaster-General is £2500. The Irish Members. The Chief Secretary for Ireland is paid £4000," with an extra yearly allowance of £425 to defray the special travelling and other expenses of the post, and has an official residence in the Phoenix Park. The corresponding Scottish Minister, Secretary for Scotland, has a salary of £2OOO. The most highly-paid office in the administration is that of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who has £20,000 a year, with an allowance of £2769 4s 8d (or £3OOO Irish) for outfit on appointment, and the Vice-regal Lodge and Dublin Castle as residences. It is a princely salary—but it carries princely obligations. To the office of VicePresident of the Irish Department of Agriculture a salary of £I2OO is attached. In 1907 the salary of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland was reduced from £BOOO to £6OOO. The Attorney-General for Ireland gets £SOOO a year, and fees which amounted in 1911-12 to £646 16s; and the Solicitor-General for Ireland gets £2OOO a year, and fees which in the same" year reached the total of £405 6s. :&

Indeed, the best-paid posts in the Government are the legal. The Lord Chancellor of England is paid £IO,OO0 —£4000 as Speaker of the House of Lords, and £6OOO as the highest judicial official in the land. The Attorney-General gets £7OOO, and the SolicitorGeneral £6OOO. As in the case of the Irish law officers, both also receive high fees for cases they conduct on behalf of the Crown in the Law Courts. In 1911-12 the fees of the Attorney-General were £6321, and those of the. Solicitor-General £4247. The Lord Advocate of Scotland is paid £SOOO, and the SolicitorGeneral for Scotland £2ooo,’and both also receive fees.

Sinecure Offices.

1 There are three sinecure posts in the Administration. The first in dignity is that of the Lord President of the Council. He presides over the Privy Council, but practically the only occasion upon which it meets is at the demise of the Crown, when it assembles' to proclaim the new sovereign. Then there is the office of the Lord Privy Seal, a survival from the historic past, when the Privy Council sought to restrain the acts of absolute monarchy by insisting that the Lord Chancellor should not affix the imprimatur of the Great Seal to any grant or patent or writ which the sovereign desired to issue, without their authorisation in the form of a warrant under the Privy Seal. Under Parliamentary Government the Lord Privy Seal has ceased to have any duties. The third office of dignity rather than responsibilty is that of the Chancellor of the Duchy of . Lancaster. His duties, in relation to the control of the revenues of the Duchy, which are vested in the Sovereign and the Prince of Wales, are purely nominal. To each. of these posts there is a salary of £2OOO attached. The Ministers appointed to them, having no departmental work of their own, are expected to come to the assistance of a colleague who is hard pressed in the House of Lords or the House of Commons.

*f' : The Unpaid Paymaster-General. t Finally, there is one unpaid, Minister in the Administration, and he, strange to say, is the PaymasterGeneral. He is the head of the office which pays out

the vast sums placed to its credit by the Treasury the - X moneys voted by Parliament to the various departments * of the State to enable tjiem to carry on their services. He issues the warrants for the salaries of his colleagues in the Ministry, and gets nothing himself. : It would seem to be a tantalising position. But it is not salary, it is the position, with its dignity and influence, that is the attraction,' and the Paymaster-General, though unpaid, is a member of the Administration. That is true" also of a good many other posts. The nominal income of some of the Ministers is no guide to their actual profit. The Prime Minister has to entertain a good deal. In fact, Lord John Russell said he never knew what it was to be a poor man until he attained that exalted office. Entertaining has also to be done by the Secretaries of State. Of course, it is true that the post of Cabinet Minister, with an emolument of £SOOO a year, can never be without attractions ; bub these attractions are not so much financial as the honor of service and power.