the men of the nineteenth century thought our principal Finance Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, would be, as in France, responsible for it.  But the English law was different somehow.  The Patent Office was under the Lord Chancellor, and the Court of Chancery is one of the multitude of our institutions which owe their existence to free competition, and so it was the Lord Chancellor’s business to look after the fees, which of course, as an occupied judge, he could not.  A certain Act of Parliament did indeed require that the fees of the Patent Office should be paid into the “Exchequer”; and, again, the “Chancellor of the Exchequer” was thought to be responsible in the matter, but only by those who did not know.  According to our system the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the enemy of the Exchequer; a whole series of enactments try to protect it from him.  Until a few months ago there was a very lucrative sinecure called the “Comptrollership of the Exchequer,” designed to guard the Exchequer against its Chancellor; and the last holder, Lord Monteagle, used to say he was the pivot of the English Constitution.  I have not room to explain what he meant, and it is not needful; what is to the purpose is that, by an inherited series of historical complexities, a defaulting clerk in an office of no litigation was not under natural authority, the Finance Minister, but under a far-away judge who had never heard of him.

The whole office of the Lord Chancellor is a heap of anomalies.  He is a judge, and it is contrary to obvious principle that any part of administration should be entrusted to a judge; it is of very grave moment that the administration of justice should be kept clear of any sinister temptations.  Yet the Lord Chancellor, our chief judge, sits in the Cabinet, and makes party speeches in the Lords.  Lord Lyndhurst was a principal Tory politician, and yet he presided in the O’Connell case.  Lord Westbury was in chronic wrangle with the bishops, but he gave judgment upon “Essays and Reviews”.  In truth, the Lord Chancellor became a Cabinet Minister, because, being near the person of the sovereign, he was high in court precedence, and not upon a political theory wrong or right.

A friend once told me that an intelligent Italian asked him about the principal English officers, and that he was very puzzled to explain their duties, and especially to explain the relation of their duties to their titles.  I do not remember all the cases, but I can recollect that the Italian could not comprehend why the First “Lord of the Treasury” had as a rule nothing to do with the Treasury, or why the “Woods and Forests” looked after the sewerage of towns.  This conversation was years before the cattle plague, but I should like to have heard the reasons why the Privy Council Office had charge of that malady.  Of course one could give an historical reason, but I mean an administrative reason a reason which would show, not how it came to have the duty, but why in future it should keep it.