Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE CABINET SYSTEM Evolution and Accident. There is no part of our system more interesting to consider under the three different aspects, to which reference has just been made, than that which is the centre of the whole. From the legal point of view the Cabinet is only a committee of the Privy Council, and its members are merely " his Majesty's servants," the high officers who are entrusted by their sovereign with the management of the great administrative departments, and from whom he may obtain confidential advice on affairs of state. According to the conventions of the constitution the Cabinet is the responsible executive, having the complete control of administration and the general direction of all national business, but exercising these vast powers under the strict supervision of the representative chamber, to which it is accountable for all its acts and omissions. If we look only at the actualities of the case, we might be inclined to say that the Cabinet, in its existing shape, is a committee not of Parliament, but of one party in They are still so styled in the sammons to a Cabinet Council. Parliament, which while it is in office has the control of legislation, administration, policy and finance. It is a committee which owes its existence to the majority of the electorate, to whom alone it is really, though fitfully, responsible. And if we peer below the surface of things a little closer, we might even conclude that its chief functions have passed from the Cabinet as a whole, and that they have been transferred to an inner council or conclave, consisting of the Prime Minister and the three or four influential colleagues who share his confidence and are habitually consulted by him. Englishmen are sometimes disposed to look upon the developmen...