of matching a Ministry is more than that of fitting a puzzle, because the Ministers to be put in can object, though the bits of a puzzle cannot.  One objector can throw out the combination.  In 1847 Lord Grey would not join Lord John Russell’s projected Government if Lord Palmerston was to be Foreign Secretary; Lord Palmerston would be Foreign Secretary, and so the Government was not formed.  The cases in which a single refusal prevents a Government are rare, and there must be many concurrent circumstances to make it effectual.  But the cases in which refusals impair or spoil a Government are very common.  It almost never happens that the Ministry-maker can put into his offices exactly whom he would like; a number of placemen are always too proud, too eager, or too obstinate to go just where they should.

Again, this system not only makes new Ministers ignorant, but keeps present Ministers indifferent.  A man cannot feel the same interest that he might in his work if he knows that by events over which he has no control, by errors in which he had no share, by metamorphoses of opinion which belong to a different sequence of phenomena, he may have to leave that work in the middle, and may very likely never return to it.  The new man put into a fresh office ought to have the best motive to learn his task thoroughly, but, in fact, in England, he has not at all the best motive.  The last wave of party and politics brought him there, the next may take him away.  Young and eager men take, even at this disadvantage, a keen interest in office work, but most men, especially old men, hardly do so.  Many a battered Minister may be seen to think much more of the vicissitudes which make him and unmake him, than of any office matter.

Lastly, a sudden change of Ministers may easily cause a mischievous change of policy.  In many matters of business, perhaps in most, a continuity of mediocrity is better than a hotch-potch of excellences.  For example, now that progress in the scientific arts is revolutionising the instruments of war, rapid changes in our head-preparers for land and sea war are most costly and most hurtful.  A single competent selector of new inventions would probably in the course of years, after some experience, arrive at something tolerable; it is in the nature of steady, regular, experimenting ability to diminish, if not vanquish, such difficulties.  But a quick succession of chiefs has no similar facility.  They do not learn from each other’s experience;—­you might as well expect the new head boy at a public school to learn from the experience of the last head boy.  The most valuable result of many years is a nicely balanced mind instinctively heedful of various errors; but such a mind is the incommunicable gift of individual experience, and an outgoing Minister can no more leave it to his successor, than an elder brother can pass it on to a younger.  Thus a desultory and incalculable policy may follow from a rapid change of Ministers.