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217.: THE MARVELLOUS MINISTRY EXAMINER, 29 SEPT., 1833, PP. 609-11 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II [1831]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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217.

THE MARVELLOUS MINISTRY

EXAMINER, 29 SEPT., 1833, PP. 609-11

For the entry in Mill’s bibliography and the context of this second leading article in reply to Le Marchant’s The Reform Ministry, see No. 216. In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, the article is listed as title and enclosed in square brackets.

we resume our examination of the Ministerial Manifesto.

The first Session of the Reformed Parliament has been prolific in legislation concerning Ireland. Besides producing an Irish Church Bill, it has also produced an Irish Tithe Bill, and an Irish Coercion Bill.1 Not only for the so-called Church Reform, but for the Tithe Bill, and even for the Coercion Bill, applause is claimed in behalf of the Ministry by this unwearied eulogist. They have placed Ireland under martial law, and outrages have ceased. “They made the giants first, and then they killed them.”2 The outrages were wholly a consequence of the insane attempt to enforce the collection of tithe; and have been put an end to, not by the Coercion Bill, but by the cessation of that dignified contest, in which horse, foot, and artillery took the field to enable a collector to sell a poor man’s pig, and the pig returned home unsold! The Tithe Bill set the final legislative seal to the relinquishment of claims which had already been tacitly abandoned. The lawless outbreakings of the Irish are of the nature of rebellion; they are the mode in which that nation resist what they deem oppression, and they have drawn off their forces because the enemy have sounded a retreat. Ministers chose rather to alienate a whole people than confess themselves vanquished, and their Coercion Bill, which looked so fierce and has proved so gentle, turns out to have been, as Lord Grey said of a foolish lord’s foolish speech, “all sound and fury, signifying nothing;”3 a mere flourish of trumpets, to give a defeat the air of a triumph; and John Bull pays for all. No marvel if the Irish are quiet, having got all they desired.

But to understand how far the wisdom, the foresight of Ministers has reached in the matter of Irish Tithe, it is necessary to go a little further back.

When they came into office the passive resistance had commenced: the clergy could not collect their tithe, and that unpopular impost had practically repealed itself. As usual, the redress which would have been denied to justice was granted to force, and the injury we had no longer the power of inflicting, we magnanimously resolved to forbear to inflict. Mr. Stanley, the “shave-beggar,”4 as careless of his words as of his actions, and equally incapable of weighing the consequences of either, proclaimed the “extinction of tithes.”5 But while tithes were to be extinguished in futurum, the existing arrear was to be exacted at the bayonet’s point; not, to be sure, for the value of the sum, which besides would be almost all swallowed up by the expense of collection, but to “enforce respect for the law.”6 And nobly the scheme has succeeded, and glorious is the respect which has redounded to the law and to all law from this well-advised enterprise! After exhibiting the whole strength of a Government, with all its civil and all its military apparatus, arrayed against an unarmed people, and by that unarmed people baffled and disgraced for two entire years; after teaching to the Irish, aye, and to the English and Scotch, a lesson of successful disobedience of the laws, which they will never forget, which they are even now putting in practice all over the land; after wantonly establishing for this single purpose a precedent, the reach of which passes the bounds of human conjecture, a precedent for placing a whole nation out the pale of law—it has even come to this, that the thing is impossible, and must be abandoned. But old rules are reversed; in these our days it is the beaten who triumph! They have not the excuse of the blind, that they had blind guides. They were warned of all this. They were told that the tithe would not be paid. They were told that all their efforts to exact it would only cover themselves with ridicule, and involve the law and the Government in still deeper detestation. They were told that of the two evils, if it were necessary to choose one, it was far preferable that England, even England, which from time immemorial has paid the price whoever else reaped the gain, should indemnify the parsons, and bribe them to let the tithe-payers alone: though the funds which ought on every rational principle to have borne the burthen, were the endowments of the Church of Ireland. The Ministers were deaf to these warnings. They persisted in their folly. As they have sown so have they reaped. We have had the disgraceful contest between the people and the Government. We have had the triumph of anarchy, the successful defiance of the law. We have had their Coercion Bill, their martial law, on the pretext of punishing that defiance. And after all this evil has been incurred we have likewise that other evil, which had it been inflicted to prevent the former, we might better have endured. Since the people of Ireland will not pay tithe, they will not be required to pay, and the people of England are paying it in their stead. Memorable result of the combined wisdom and vigour of a memorable Ministry! Were it only for this, they will live in the remembrance of men as long as a signal example shall be wanted of feebleness joined with presumption.

Even what they have at last done, they had not the good sense nor the courage to do spiritedly, directly, and above board. They could give twenty millions to the West India planters, but they did not like to propose to give one million to the Irish clergy: it was therefore lent. Lent to whom? to the clergy doubtless; to be repaid then by the clergy? not at all: to be repaid by the landlord. But the landlord! why the landlord? by what right? with what colour of justice? Why single out from the nation one class, (a class, it is true, little used to be selected for undergoing injustice,) and require them to pay a debt which is not theirs, which was incurred by the obstinacy and improvidence of the Government? True; it would be unjust to lay it on the landlords, on the landlords therefore it shall not lie. Where then to place it? Now will the historian of a future age open his eyes and stare with astonishment at the device which was hit upon to reconcile all difficulties. The clergy are to be indemnified by the State, the State is to be indemnified by the landlords, and the landlords, bless the mark! are to be indemnified by the tithe-owing tenant. The origin and motive of the whole proceeding was that the Government itself, having gone forth with soldiers and field-pieces to collect the tithes, had been unable to accomplish it; and what the State has given up as desperate, it turns over to the landlords, as satisfaction for what it forces them to pay in quite other coin; as though it should confiscate the whole of their earthly estates, and assign to them a corresponding number of acres in nubibus by way of compensation! The very best supposition the case admits of, for the credit of Ministers, is that the whole transaction was a premeditated fraud. They should instruct their friends to give out that they knew the indemnity was a delusion; that they knew the tenant could not be forced to pay to the landlord what he could not be forced to pay to the State; and that their object was to lay a partial tax upon the Irish landowners without avowing the intention.

We pass to their measures relating to the public revenue and expenditure, and the kindred subject of commercial legislation.

The Ministerial pamphleteer insists with great emphasis upon the retrenchments which have been accomplished, and of which he makes an elaborate display.7 He is much in the right; no part of the conduct of his patrons makes a fairer show; pity that it is but a show! Their advocate has seized, perhaps, the only moment in the history of their administration, at which the merit of economy could colourably be attributed to them. The expenses which they have retrenched have just ended, those which they have caused are only about to begin. They have remitted taxes, since they came into office, to the amount altogether of more than three millions; but unless the retrenchments they have effected are but a trifle to those they will yet effect, wait and see what are the new taxes they will be obliged to lay on. Twenty millions to the West India planters, of which all but about three and a half were sheer waste; a million to the Irish clergy; nearly two millions (we forget the exact sum) lent, or what is the same thing, given, to the baby King of Greece;8 the interest of all this has to be provided for by new taxes: besides an indefinite annual sum for supplying all the West India colonies with what the mother country has never yet had the good fortune to possess, viz., a stipendiary magistracy, a police, and universal education. Several millions are, moreover, to be repaid to the East India Company and to the Bank: sums which had been lent to Government, part of them, we believe, at no interest at all, the whole of them at less than the market rate. Some of these expenses Ministers proposed to meet by an extra tax on colonial sugar;9 but they must be very simple people who can believe that sugar will not already be extra-taxed beyond all endurance. Ministers have looked to that matter already. Perhaps it was an inevitable effect of the emancipation of the negroes in whatever manner, but certainly of their emancipation in the thoughtless and clumsy manner in which our present rulers have decreed it, that the supply of sugar from our colonies must greatly diminish, and its price rise in a corresponding proportion, perhaps to even treble or quadruple the existing prices. In order that this last desirable effect may be made more sure, Ministers, in so far as depended upon them, have guaranteed to the West Indians the continuance of their present monopoly of the home market. It is, indeed, quite out of the question that Parliament should pay the slightest regard to any such pretended engagement; but it will be many years before Asia can afford a supply equal to the demands of Europe: and to admit the produce of foreign slave colonies after abolishing slavery in ours, would be to stultify our own measure; it would be renouncing, not injustice, but only the fruits of injustice, and continuing to be accessaries in the guilt for the profit of others. Instead therefore of increasing, Ministers will, more probably, be compelled to diminish the duties on sugar; and either way, new taxes must be found to make up for the partial drying up of one of the largest sources of our revenue. A similar observation applies to another of the most productive of our taxes, the tax on tea.10 Hitherto this duty has been collected at absolutely no expense: hereafter the charges of collection will be as great as in the case of other taxes; and it is at least problematical whether the effect of opening the trade to the unlimited competition of buyers, while the sellers in China are a close company of monopolists, and smuggling* almost impossible, will not be to raise instead of lowering the price of the article in the English market, and consequently to diminish the consumption and the revenue.

Under these financial disadvantages, all of their own creating, Ministers must bestir themselves again, and vigorously, in the work of retrenchment, if they would avoid the humiliating necessity of laying on taxes to more than the amount of those which they have recently taken off.

And their choice of taxes to be remitted; could it have been more unhappily made? To their first Budget, indeed, this criticism does not apply.11 Memorable were the blunders of that Budget; but it was in laying on taxes, not in taking them off. In that one year, Ministers were luckily guided, in their remissions of taxes, by Sir Henry Parnell’s book;12 following that, they could not go far wrong; and they relieved us from several of the worst of our indirect taxes. There were two features of great merit in that first Budget, which have disappeared from the subsequent ones—an encroachment upon the Canada timber monopoly, (equal to a tax of one million a-year,) and a reduction of the Stamp Duty on Newspapers.13 Ministers were frightened out of the former of these meritorious purposes, by a single defeat, in the unreformed House of Commons. As to the latter, their hearts failed them; and whether it was pusillanimity or treachery, Lord Althorp, (disclaiming all the while any agency in the enforcement of the law,) said that the tax ought to be abolished, and took off a million and a half of other taxes instead.14 And what a selection! A sort of perverted genius was shown in finding the means of giving away a million and a half a-year in perpetuity, and pleasing no one—conferring a perceptible relief upon nobody. The secret of this was, excessive eagerness to do a little for everybody. Not a tax, except a few of trifling amount, was entirely repealed; only halves and quarters of taxes; the remaining part continuing to be collected at the same expense absolutely as the whole, and, of course, at a far greater proportionally; and the worst evil of indirect taxes, the onerous regulations and restrictions imposed for the convenience of collection, being perpetuated. The mere reduction of a tax, when the state of the revenue admits of its entire abolition, is hardly ever advisable; except for the prevention of smuggling, or when the lower duty is expected to be as productive as the higher. In the case of very few of the reductions was either of these results anticipated; nor was there any ground for anticipating them, nor any reason for reducing those particular taxes rather than many others; nor was the reduction in almost any case sufficient to make a perceptible difference in the yearly expenses of the consumer. Perhaps, indeed, if a sensible relief had been afforded to one portion of the dissatisfied, all the others would have been only the louder in their complaints. But a firm Ministry, strong in the authority of pure intentions and determination of purpose, could have overawed the interested and the peevish: our Ministers can overawe nobody, because they are afraid of everybody. These are the occasions which try the quality of men. A weak man cannot even confer a benefit, without losing more influence than he gains.

We are far from joining in the whole extent of the hostility entertained by the shopkeepers of the large towns against the House Tax; which, if impartially assessed, we incline to consider as one of the best of all our imposts, having many of the recommendations of a Property Tax, without its practical difficulties. Viewing it in this light, we should be ready to give some credit to Lord Althorp for the steadiness with which he has resisted the clamours of the representatives of the ten-pound voters for the repeal of the House Tax, had he not, with strange obtuseness, volunteered reiterated defences of those iniquitous inequalities in the assessment, sparing the rich and pressing upon the middle classes, which have disgusted the whole country, and mainly contributed to raise a storm that will scarcely now be allayed but by the destruction of that tax. It was coolly, gravely maintained, not by way of a joke, nor with any apparent consciousness that the proposition at all conflicted with the common sense and feeling of mankind—it was laid down by Lord Althorp as the just principle of assessment for the House Tax, that the overgrown houses of the very rich, which never can be suitable habitations for any other than the proprietor, should be taxed, not in the ratio of what the house, as a place to reside in, costs to the owner, who actually dwells in it, but of the amount which some other person, of far inferior income, could afford to pay for it as a residence!15 A House Tax is defensible at all, only on the assumption that what a person pays for his habitation is something approximating to a test of his general means of expenditure. Let this test then be applied. What the occupier of another man’s house pays for his habitation, is the house-rent; but what the Marquis of Westminster pays for Eaton Hall, is the interest of what it would cost to rebuild such a mansion if it were destroyed.16 Were he to let it to Mr. Thompson or Johnson, he might get only 300l. a-year for it; but those 300l. are proportioned to the means of Mr. Thompson or Johnson, and are the measure of what the tax-gatherer ought to demand from him, not from the Marquis of Westminster. It is idle, however, to prove what is self-evident.

Lord Althorp has done more to weaken himself and the Ministry, by standing up night after night in the House of Commons as the vindicator of this odious abuse, than they have done to strengthen themselves by any, the most popular, measure of the Session.

But to return to their retrenchments. Cutting off useless expenditure is always praiseworthy; and to the present Ministers it must in candour be conceded that they have diminished some large salaries as well as small ones, abolished some lucrative offices as well as insignificant ones. Still, it is to be remarked that their large sum-total has been made up by the addition of a great multitude of small savings; what have been termed, by persons interested in disparaging them, savings of cheese-parings and candle-ends: those reductions in the detail of the expenditure, which we have again and again been solemnly assured had been carried to the utmost extent possible, to an extent seriously prejudicial to the conduct of public business. We see, however, that when a real wish was entertained to make a still further reduction of this minimum, the minimum was found to be a maximum. One fifth of the actual expenses of governing the country, as this pamphleteer triumphantly proclaims, cut off in three years!17 After several retrenching ministries had done their worst—out of about fifteen millions a saving of three millions in cheese-parings and candle-ends alone! “Le mot impossible (said Napoleon) n’est pas Français.”18 —Credit after this who will, the impossibilities of heads of departments! But it is true, nevertheless, that these three millions are made up of small savings, and that the whole region of large ones is still untrodden. We refer particularly to the diplomatic service, the army and navy, and the colonies.

There are people who say, The diplomatic service is too expensive, it has not yet been reduced, it will bear reduction. We say, the diplomatic service ought to be abolished altogether. Consuls, at some places where the laws of the foreign country are an insufficient protection, we can discern a use for; and sometimes, but rarely, for an extraordinary envoy: for a stationary ambassador, never. At the time when statesmen could barely write their names, and when all business of importance was transacted by word of mouth, there was meaning in ambassadors. But now, when the art of written is so much more successfully cultivated than that of spoken composition; when the communication between court and court is as easy and safe, and almost as expeditious, as between any man and his next-door neighbour; when between the ambassador himself and the government to whom he is accredited, all negociations are conducted by means of written documents—why should not the writings pass between Governments themselves? What is the ambassador, but a middleman uselessly interposed between principal and principal? In the way of intelligence, again, what is there left to communicate, in an age of universal publicity, in an age of daily newspapers? Sufficient proof that there is nothing for an ambassador to do, is the quality of the men who are set to do it. They are fit enough for the purpose for which in reality they are kept up, viz. to give dinners to our aristocracy when abroad, and to keep a table for their idle younger sons in the character of attachés: but for what else?

Then the colonies: all which are worth keeping, all which for the good of the colonies themselves ought to be kept, might be made to defray their own expenses. Read Colonel Napier’s inestimable work on the Ionian Islands, if you would learn how a distant dependency ought not, and also how it ought, to be governed.19 When a colony cannot pay for its own government, the reason generally is, first, because we insist upon governing it as if it were an opulent nation: we carry out with us from England as the mining associations did to Mexico, and with a similar result, English ideas of efficiency, and English ideas of lavish expense: not knowing, that to a rude state of society the simplest machinery of government is best adapted, we must have the establishments, the salaries, and even the pomps and fripperies, of an old country. That is one cause. Another is, that we entrust the governorship of the colony to one of the family of the Feebles, who either employs his activity in doing mischief, or, by his indolence, allows, that is, encourages others to do it: one who neither knows the right time for spending money, nor the right time for saving it; one who wastes the resources of the colony by mere mismanagement; who alternately strains and relaxes the springs of government; every one of whose blunders costs money to repair its consequences; and whose most expensive blunder of all is his unpopularity. For all which, and much else, see again Colonel Napier; whose book should be in the hands, not only of every statesman and every public writer, but of every Englishman.

If the colonies were made to pay their own expenses, economy in our military establishment would be in a great measure accomplished; for the far greater portion of our army is kept up for the service of our colonies alone. By governing Ireland well, we might dispense with the greater part of the remainder. What need has England of an army, except one or two cavalry regiments, and the artillery? Can we ever be suddenly involved in a continental war? And if we were, can we possibly maintain such an army as would be a match, at the instant, for any one of the continental powers? Then why attempt it?

No nation which is not perpetually at war, can have a veteran army; but to make the rawest new levies fight like lions, there is a sure resource. Proclaim the system of the French army, promotion from the ranks.20 Encourage the non-commissioned officers, even now confessedly the main strength of our army, by the hope of commissions; let every man of them know that if he have the soul of a Hoche, the fortune of a Hoche is open to him.21That would be the true substitute for flogging, and for impressment too. Govern men by their hopes, and you need not by their fears: let your generals rise from the ranks, and your admirals from before the mast, and you need neither compel soldiers or sailors into the service, nor treat them like slaves or brutish beasts when in it; dismissal from it will be punishment enough. But neither from the Whig nor from any other Ministers shall we obtain this, until the spirit of aristocracy is completely purged out of our institutions. The monopoly of the army and navy is the last monopoly which will be wrested from the hands of the wealthy. There are many changes yet to come ere that comes. It will be much, when we shall no longer, to provide for gentlemen’s sons, keep up numerous admirals for every ship, numerous generals for every regiment. It will be much, when we shall no longer, to provide for gentlemen’s sons, make a retiring pension a perpetuity, and maintain our Dead Weight scarcely diminished during eighteen years of peace.22

Curious it is that the apologist of the Ministers reckons the Dead Weight among the public charges not susceptible of reduction. He means then, that officers not on the effective strength of the army, who have not been once on full pay since the peace, who are supernumerary, superfluous, and ought to have retained their half-pay on the footing merely of a life pension, shall, when it would in a very few years have lapsed by death, be allowed to sell their commission to a youth, who steps into the place of an old man, and continues to receive the old man’s retiring allowance after his death—a youth who will never be wanted until the next war, if even then, and in the mean time is only gathering seniority but not experience, eating his half-pay as the bread of idleness,23 a mere liveried footman of the aristocracy. The Ministry have appointed a Committee on Naval and Military Appointments, and the Committee has not recommended the abolition of this flagrant abuse.24 Ministers do not intend it, then; but unless they correct their intention, their boast of being a Ministry of retrenchment will deserve to count for very little.

Even in their own small way of clipping and paring the details of the public expenses, much is still to be done which they seem to have no thought of doing. To begin with themselves: of what earthly use is a Lord Privy Seal?25 The utility of a President and a Vice-President of the Board of Trade, or, indeed, of either of the two, is very questionable. Why were the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall excepted from the surrender of the hereditary revenues of the Crown?26 The expenditure of those duchies, being sheltered from any kind of publicity, are, we may be sure, the last hiding place of every job too openly disgraceful to be hazarded in the presence of the public. What need of the expensive foppery of household troops? Why should the Guards cost more than an equal number of other regiments? Economy has marched, with pruning-knife in hand, along the grand avenues of the public expenditure, but it has not yet peered into the bye-alleys. The harpies of corruption, frightened out of the open daylight, will be found skulking and cowering in the dark corners. Let Mr. Hume look narrowly into those little modest items of the Miscellaneous Estimates, the grants of 5000l. and 10,000l. under pretence of work to be done off the common highways of public business and public view. The two words Record Commission, alone speak volumes.27 The public eye has been let in, perhaps, upon the most expensive jobs, but we much doubt whether it has yet obtained a view of the most profligate ones.

We have demanded a large share of the reader’s indulgence; our excuse must be, that we are reviewing not a pamphlet, but an administration. We trust that all we shall at present deem it necessary to say, may be brought to a conclusion in another article.28

[1 ]For the Church Bill, see No. 216, n4. The others were enacted in 1833 as 3 & 4 William IV, c. 100 (Tithes) and 3 William IV, c. 4 (Coercion); the former is discussed by Le Marchant in The Reform Ministry, p. 10, the latter, pp. 6-8.

[2 ]Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb: A Tragedy (1730), I, v, 33; in Works, Vol. II, p. 24.

[3 ]Charles Grey, Speech on Church Temporalities (Ireland) (17 July, 1833), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 19, col. 720, with reference to the speech in the same debate (ibid.) by Richard Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville (1776-1839), 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos. Grey is, of course, adapting Shakespeare, Macbeth, V, v, 27-8 (in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1337).

[4 ]For the phrase, see No. 216, n10.

[5 ]Stanley, Speech on Tithes (Ireland) (14 Feb., 1832), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 10, col. 322.

[6 ]Cf. Stanley, Speech on Tithes (Ireland) (8 Mar., 1832), ibid., col. 1367.

[7 ]Le Marchant, pp. 18-34.

[8 ]Otho (or Otto) (1815-67), son of Louis I of Bavaria, accepted the throne of Greece in May 1832 (when he was not exactly a baby). His European supporters supplied a generous loan, Britain being liable for one-third (£800,000). See 2 & 3 William IV, c. 121 (1832).

[9 ]See Spencer, “Resolution on Supply—Sugar Duties” (16 Mar., 1833), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 16, cols. 324-5.

[10 ]Altered by 3 & 4 William IV, c. 101 (1833).

[* ]Tea is a bulky article in proportion to its prime cost, and is understood to be carried several hundred miles by land on men’s backs to Canton; the difficulty of smuggling must, therefore, be almost insuperable.

[11 ]See No. 86 for Mill’s estimate of that Budget.

[12 ]On Financial Reform (London: Murray, 1830), by Henry Brooke Parnell (1776-1842), later 1st Baron Congleton, Secretary at War in Grey’s administration 1831-32, a writer on currency and banking, as well as on Irish grievances.

[13 ]See Spencer, speech of 11 Feb., 1831, cols. 417 (timber) and 411-13 (newspaper stamps). For the defeat of the timber duties, see No. 195, n11.

[14 ]Spencer, Speech on Supply—the Budget (19 Apr., 1833), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 17, cols. 331-2.

[15 ]Spencer, Speech on the House and Window Taxes (30 Apr., 1833), ibid., col. 775.

[16 ]The residence near Chester of Robert Grosvenor (1767-1845), 1st Marquis of Westminster, a Whig who had been an M.P. 1788-1802, and was becoming increasingly wealthy from his properties in Belgravia and Pimlico.

[17 ]Le Marchant, p. 20.

[18 ]Napoleon, Letter to General Count Lemarois (9 July, 1813), in Correspondence de Napoléon Ier, 32 vols. (Paris: Plon, and Dumaine, 1858-70), Vol. XXV, p. 479.

[19 ]Charles James Napier, The Colonies (London: Boone, 1833), reviewed by Mill in No. 224. Napier (1782-1853), a veteran of the peninsular wars, was appointed field inspector in the Ionian Islands in 1819 and Resident at Cephalonia in 1820.

[20 ]See Décrets sur l’avancement militaire (20 Sept., 1790), Moniteur, 1790, p. 1095.

[21 ]Louis Lazare Hoche (1768-97) rose from the ranks, a grenadier at sixteen and general in command of the Army of the Moselle at twenty-five.

[22 ]The “Dead Weight” was Cobbett’s description of the annuities relating to naval and military pensions from the Napoleonic Wars, which the government had argued in 1822 were a “dead expense,” not a part of ordinary expenditure but a dwindling liability (PD, n.s., Vol. 7, col. 164).

[23 ]Cf. Proverbs, 31:27.

[24 ]See “Report from the Select Committee on Army and Navy Appointments” (12 Aug., 1833), PP, 1833, VII, 10-11.

[25 ]The fifth in precedence of the great officers of state (coming before the dukes), his custodianship of the privy seal was virtually formal in Mill’s time, though it originally, in the reign of Edward III, was seen as a check on the royal power.

[26 ]The Royal Duchy of Lancaster, dating from the reign of Henry IV, and that of Cornwall, dating from the reign of Edward III, were royal appanages, the latter reserved for the monarch’s eldest son. They were excepted in Sects. 3 and 9 of 1 George III, c. 1 (1760).

[27 ]Set up in 1800 to arrange and preserve the official records, and to make them available through publication, the Record Commission had a sad reputation for inaction and inefficiency at that time. For the current grant of £10,000, see “Finance Accounts,” PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 20, App., p. xxii.

[28 ]See No. 218, but Mill’s forecast was much in error, so see also Nos. 219, 220, 221, and 223.