the honest and common wish of all to render good account of their stewardship, Members find themselves unable to chip off the least fragment from the mass of the yearly estimates, far less can they reduce that bulk to any considerable extent. Billiard tables for the diversion of military men; snuff-boxes to gratify foreign ministers; Queen's Plates' to amuse the Irish people; as well as soldiers, sailors, and 81-ton guns for the defence of the Empire, alike are voted by the Commons. Whether to obtain big sums, or little sums, Governments have only to apply their majority,' and that majority never fails. 6 Some principle evidently must be at work to produce such a uniform, undeviating line of conduct, tending, as it does, rather against, than in accord with the wish and intention of Parliament. That principle is this: a controlling State-authority cannot be, also, an administrative authority. The House of Commons, acting as the dispenser of the Parliamentary aids, acts solely as a controlling authority; the sole power of the Committee of Supply, both in theory and practice, is restrictive, not initiative. Parliament can check the general policy of a Government, but cannot check the routine work of a State Department. And as controversy in Parliament over the grant of money, almost invariably turns not on the object of the grant, but on its amount; and as that amount depends upon Departmental routine; the dispute, immediately, resolves itself into a question of administration; this brings debate under the sway of official authority, drives it beyond the sphere of Parliamentary control, and creates a responsibility which the Commons cannot face. This difficulty was not felt in former times, when public affairs, in effect, administered themselves; during days, for instance, when prisoners were left in gaol to the alternative of begging or starving, and when each plague-struck wretch was boxed up in his home to recover, or to die alone. Those cheap administrative expedients then were possible: man had not then increased, with the increasing value of his resources, his own value also. The refusal of supplies in those days was as simple, as easy a matter, as the structure of our domestic policy was easy and simple. Compare, however, the texture of English society, two hundred years ago, with the complex garment forced on us by our social acquirements and by scientific knowledge; and the emergency created if a single important item of State expenditure were stripped away becomes apparent. The mere growth of the Empire makes, year by year, the * 'Parliamentary Practice,' Sir T. Erskine May, 603, 604. question question of its expenditure more and more uncontrovertible, and endows our State mechanism with a value and importance increasingly beyond the actual cost of maintenance. The stoppage even of a single movement in that machine would entail inconvenience and waste, far surpassing the sum required to carry it on. The yearly estimates are not, indeed, the creation of the brain of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, or of a permanent officer of the Treasury; but of public opinion-a power even more despotic. That power, the Wisdom of our day, may be imagined as ever standing before the entering in of Downing Street and crying, not in vain, to every Government within its doors, 'You must spend much money in costly experiments to secure the external defence of the country; to provide for the welfare both of idle and of working men, and of those in health, and of all the sick and sorry, you must build museums, schools, and asylums. Money also must flow out freely, if your cities are to be kept in a moderately wholesome state, and your citizens even moderately protected by law and justice.' Manifold, truly, are the demands to which a popularity-seeking Government might defer if, according to one, most honest and able, among our advisers, this is the present tendency of public opinion:-Every one now wants everything to be done for him; everybody wants to be paid for what he does; and everybody says that unless he is well paid, it is not to be expected that the work will be well done.'* The mere course of time augments the weight and pressure of our Imperial expenditure. When the component parts of that expenditure are analysed, that mighty outflow, it will be seen, receives overwhelming strength and impetus from the wide area of time over which our national undertakings extend. The manufacture of a gun may be the glory or the annoyance of several successive administrations. No single Government now draws up the finance accounts it presents to Parliament; long before it existed, those accounts were shaped by the action of its predecessors. No ministry ever enjoys the custody of the national receipts; that fund, long before they enter the Treasury, has been dispersed by previous Chancellors, and is already gone to answer for many an old diplomatic complication, or exploded theory. Our estimates being thus built up by a series of over- and underlapping responsibilities, and of liability upon liability, may be likened to a lofty cliff, seamed across the face by bands of successive strata telling the * Mr. Henley, March 20th, 1866. Hans. Deb.,' 3rd series, 182, 602. history The history of its growth. That broad and rigid line defines the course of a vanished statesman, whose strong will would have its way; a sudden 'fault,' and the overlying débris is the result of a sudden, hasty economy, and of its consequent waste. touch of political empirics shows itself in crotchety, zigzag displacements of the strata; and all those numerous bands, trending away, but never dying out, are the deposit of many an extinct national aspiration, and forgotten accident. And, in the presence of these towering accumulations, dating, as they do, from the prehistoric ages of the political world, it is deemed right to treat the questions involved in the estimates as ordinary party questions; it is thought an easy thing to cut and carve those compacted masses, and something profitable to scramble about that cliff, shrieking out, profligate expenditure!' The good sense of the majority forbids the Commons from engaging in such a pastime: they feel that the burthen of centuries cannot be so lightly dealt with; they feel, also, that the denial of a grant would inflict on them the need to fill up, somehow, the vacancy so made. They know, for instance,-if they refused the money for a picture gallery, or for the torpedo service, that an Art Exhibition, formed by their collective wisdom, would certainly not be, a joy for ever;' and that their own manufactory of those missiles would be but a dangerous and doubtful economy. Thus the House perceives, as regards all matters involving the very being of the Realm, that they must trust the Government, because, in fact, they have no option in the matter. And, if that position be as sure as we deem it to be, are they in error if they extend the same principle to those minor features in the estimates, such as scientific expeditions, and the decoration of foreign gentlemen, or the adornment of the royal archers of Scotland? But if a sound principle, acting with imperative force, extorts from Parliament the supplies asked for by every Government,— where, it may be asked, lies the sphere of Parliamentary control? This would be our answer. The Commons should, after due preliminary explanation, place entire confidence in Governments regarding the demands they make in the House; under that roof ministers are sure to see how admirable a thing would be a surplus wherewith to bless the land, their supporters, and themselves. Thrift is preached to them by the mere sight of the Treasury bench. But the Commons must place no confidence at all in any Ministry, when they sit their departmental pockets well lined in Whitehall, and not at Westminster. Waste of money, if it takes place, takes place not in Parliament, or within the Cabinet, but in the Government offices, at at the royal arsenals, upon the desks of Chief Constructors. The duty of Parliament is to see what story those places have to tell about the sums entrusted to them; the account of past, not of future expenditure best discloses ministerial economy, or the reverse. And the surest way of using that information to good purpose, and of getting at that story, is the examination of our Departmental accountants by a Parliamentary inquisition, composed of a carefully selected group of statesmen. A Committee of this description, since the year 1861, has been engrafted upon our method of Parliamentary Government; and thorough efficiency attends its actions. It is this most admirable addition to our political fabric, which justifies the assertion made at the opening of this essay, that the House of Commons exercises a satisfactory and vigilant control over the public expenditure. 6 Abject terror would not, for a moment, be aroused in the mind of any of the present denizens at Whitehall by the appointment of such a tribunal. To exhibit fully the inward working it might cause in the breast of a civil servant, we must turn to the pages of Pepys's 'Diary.' Dire is the consternation reflected on those pages, during the autumn of 1666, by the mere whisper of a Committee to inquire, perhaps 'sharply,' into the affairs of the Admiralty, and prompt its effect. When young Captain Beckford, the slopseller,' comes to offer Mr. Pepys a little purse, with gold in it,' he is warned off, with an ejaculation, This is not an age to make presents in.' Then the diarist is horrified by finding his name second' in the office book, against an entry of 500l. and odd;' for 'flags I had bought for the Navy, of calico.' And although by scraping out my name, and putting in Mr. Tooker's, which eased me,' Mr. Pepys was for a moment comforted; soon he is driven mad, 'stark mad,' by finding that his own journal, 'revealing all the nakedness of the office,' had been left with a doorkeeper of the House of Commons; and finally, the chairman's summons before the Committee, sent him into a 'mighty fear and trouble,—as true a trouble that I ever was in my life.' "The whirligig of time' shall now transport us from the reign of Charles II., to the reigns of George III. and of Queen Victoria, that we may give two further illustrations of the necessity,— obvious as it may seem,-of a constant supervision by Parliament over the actual disbursement of the national expenditure. During January 1782, the Commons were asked to grant 149,000l. to pay for stores of saltpetre, in quantity sufficient to pickle the atmosphere from England to the West Indies.' The absurdity and wastefulness of the purchase attracted notice; the grant was was questioned; and this was its defence. The head of the Ordnance Department joined in the outcry, declaring that the transaction was quite indefensible, that his Board had sought to keep from him all cognisance of that contract, and that, for his part, he had tried to stop it. But that, as the Board had been too much for their chief, and as the saltpetre had been bought, the vote for 149,000l. appeared upon the estimates.* The second case comes nearer home. The House, during the Session of 1861, was informed that Sir C. Barry, 'acting, as he was accustomed to do, on his own responsibility,' had spent 21,2867. on the New Palace at Westminster, in alterations, additions, and repairs,' wholly unsanctioned by anybody except himself. It followed, as an inevitable consequence, as the money had been paid away, that the Commons were obliged to settle the account. † The necessity of an independent scrutiny into the national expenditure, and of an authoritative check upon our public servants was submitted to Parliament in 1845 by a Departmental Treasury Committee, but in vain. That advice was repeated by the Committee on Public Moneys of 1857. At last, during the Session of 1861, the Public Accounts' Committee was first appointed; and next Session, it was established by Standing Order, as a permanent feature in the financial system of the Realm. Not only was this a step in the right direction; but a temptation to swerve into the wrong path was thereby removed. That temptation was the constant appeal of economic reformers to subject the yearly estimates to the revision of select Committees. The idea is specious, and has an attractive character; but the action of those Committees must clash with the executive responsibility of the Government; and even their most zealous advocates could only urge the periodical appointment of such Committees at decennial intervals of time. The Public Accounts' Committee, on the contrary, operates without intermission, with the constant, uniform vigilance of experienced minds, and without infringing upon the functions of responsible ministers.' The institution of this Committee is justly described, as the crowning act, whereby the House of Commons has been enabled to exercise a constitutional control over the public expenditure.'t Appreciation of patient labour cannot be procured without the devotion of much labour and patience; the large exercise of these rare qualities, and of tact and judgment by the Committee of *February 1st, 1782. Parl. Hist.' xxii. 948. + Civil Service Estimates,' 1861, p. 22. Hans. Deb.,' 164, 165. |