CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS.*
SIB ALGERNON WEST has written a pleasant book, illustrated with many portraits, on the many distinguished civil servants who were his contemporaries. He recalls their merits rather than their failings ; if his sketches have a fault, it is that they are sometimes too brief. He entered the Inland Revenue Department as a temporary clerk, and was thence transferred to the Admiralty as long ago as 1852. In those days there was no entrance examination. When it was decreed In 1853 that three candidates should be nominated to compete for each vacancy, the Secretary of the Treasury, then Sir William Hayter, evaded the rule by keeping in reserve "two very dull boys who, he felt sure, could never succeed, to run in competition with his friend whom he wished to be appointed." At last, however, one of his "pet idiots" contrived to beat the nominee whom he favoured. Later, in 1870, the service WU thrown open, with some exceptions, to public competition. It must be said on behalf of the old system of patronage that it had given the public service many very able and conscientious men. The modern official is inclined to magnify his office by spending as much money as possible on hordes of clerks ; the larger his staff, the more he is respected in his own circle. Compare with these spendthrifts Sir Ralph (afterwards Lord) Lingen, who left the Education Office to become Secretary of the Treasury in 1869. Mr. Gladstone • Contemporary Porbnite: NM of My Day in Paths Life, By Ear Algernon Wad. London T. Fisher Onwin. RS& DM.) eulogized him" as a ferocious economist, parsimonious with public money, looking upon the chief of each spending depart- ment as an enemy against whom he defended the public treasury." That is the type of official whom we now sorely need, but Lord Lingen has few living disciples. Lord Hammond, the permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, is remembered because he told Lord Granville on July 5th, 1870, that, "with the exception of the trouble caused by the murder in Greece of Mr. Vyner and his friends by brigands, he (Mr. Hammond) had never during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign affairs, and that he was not aware of any pressing question which Lord Granville would have to deal with immediately." The next day the candidature of a Hohenzollern prince for the Spanish throne was announced, and in a fortnight France and Prussia were at war. Sir Algernon West reminds us that Lord Dalhousie, on handing over the government of India to Lord Canning in February, 1856, assured the Queen that India was in "a state of perfect tranquillity," and that he knew of "no quarter in which it is probable that trouble will arise "—a year before the Mutiny. Lord Hammond was an indefatigable worker. Once a Minister found him absent. "Well, sir," said the loyal doorkeeper, "he has gone to a funeral, and it's the only day's pleasuring he has had for four years." "On his leaving the Foreign Office for the last time, he took his watch to Dent's. The man told him it was worn out and not worth repairing. Ali,' he said, that is my case,' and went sorrowfully Away."
The author devotes a few pages to Frederic Rogers, Lord Blachford, who was a junior contemporary of Mr. Gladstone at Eton and Oxford, and was elected Fellow of Oriel in 1833. Newman said in his closing days that "of all his friends, Lord Ble.chford was the most gifted." He became Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and a Chief Justice of Victoria publicly remarked that, while the inhabitants thought that they had had self-government for fifteen years, they had "really been governed for the whole of that time by a person of the name of Rogers." Lord Blaeliford, before entering the civil service, had joined with Montague Bernard and R. W. Church in found- ing the Guardian, as he was keenly interested in the Praetarian movement. Sir Robert Meade was another popular official in the same department. Ile had, according to the author, the art of speaking his mind without giving offence. "On one occasion when in the country he was asked to dine by a royal duke, and he said, Oh dear no, sir! If I waa to dine with you, I should be asked to dine with all my neighbours, which would be terrible.' " To his old friend, Lord Welby, the author gives a whole chapter. He was so stern an economist that Sir Robert Meade, on being summoned to a Treasury conference, wrote : "Dear Welby—Shall I bring my own coals with me lest an excess should be caused on your vote for fuel and light?" His weakness lay in a desire to do everything himself. The author suspects, however, that the long and irrelevant con- versations with which Lord Welby would entertain applicants for Treasury grants were designed to avoid awkward questions. "His table at the Treasury was a chaos. At the time of the Wainwright murder, when the poor victim's limbs were cut up and'distributed in various places, a cynical colleague was heard to say : 'What a fool the murderer was—if he had put the body on Welby's table, it would never have been discovered.'" He was once annoyed by a War Office proposal that "a chest of gold should be kept at each port for use in cage of war." "This proposal he considered so childish that he had occupied his afternoon in answering it in words of one syllable." Men , like these devoted their whole energies to administration. But Sir Algernon West reminds us that there have been many eminent literary men in the civil service, and he mentions, among others, Sir Henry Maine, Sir Spencer Walpole, Sir Henry Taylor, Tom Taylor, Sir Arthur Helps and Sir George Basest, besides Matthew Arnold and Anthony Trollop°.
In a closing chapter of much interest on No. 10 Downing Street, the author says that he lived in the house during Mr. Gladstone's first administration, 1868-74, as Mr. Gladstone did not care to leave Carlton House Terrace. Walpole accepted the house in 1735 from George the Second as an official residence for the First Lord of the Treasury, and inhabited it till hi; fall in 1742. His successors avoided Downing Street. Lord North lived in the house through his long'ministry, 1770-1782, and Pitt the younger did the same, probably because they were both poor men, without mansions of their own. Lord Grey, of the Reform Bill, was the next First Lord to live in Downing Stmmt* but Peel, who had a house in Whitehall, lived at home and used No. 10 Downing Street merely as an office. Sir Algernon West says that up to 1893-4 the Estimates still included "a small annuity for the sweeper who kept the crossing clean so that the Prime Minister should not dirty his boots on his passage from Whitehall to the Treasury "—the Prime Minister being Peel, who had had to cross the road half a century before. This story rivals the legend of the Russian guardsman who for many years was posted in the centre of a lawn outside the Tsar's palace: someone at last discovered that a former Tsar had once ordered a sentry to guard a daisy, and that the order had been mechanic- ally repeated daily every since. Palmerston, again, declined to live in Downing Street, but rode down from his house in Piccadilly to hold a Cabinet. Disraeli had the official residence redecorated when he took office in 1874 and lived there, though he had no liking for the house. Since his time, every First Lord of the Treasury in turn has used the house more or less, though Lord Salisbury held his Cabinets in the Foreign Office and not in the famous Cabinet room. Sir Algernon West is, we imagine, the only man living, not an ex-Premier, who can boast that he was the tenant of the historic house in Downing Street
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