Till lately there has been no chief minister among them, nor am Iprepared to say that there is any such chief at present. According to the existing theory of the government these gentlemen have simply been the confidential servants of the commonwealth under the President, and have been attached each to his own department without concerted political alliance among themselves, without any acknowledged chief below the President, and without any combined responsibility even to the President. If one minister was in fault--let us say the Postmaster-General--he alone was in fault, and it did not fall to the lot of any other minister either to defend him, or to declare that his conduct was indefensible. Each owed his duty and his defense to the President alone and each might be removed alone, without explanation given by the President to the others. Iimagine that the late practice of the President's cabinet has in some degree departed from this theory; but if so, the departure has sprung from individual ambition rather than from any pre-concerted plan. Some one place in the cabinet has seemed to give to some one man an opportunity of making himself pre-eminent, and of this opportunity advantage has been taken. I am not now intending to allude to any individual, but am endeavoring to indicate the way in which a ministerial cabinet, after the fashion of our British cabinet, is struggling to get itself righted. No doubt the position of Foreign Secretary has for some time past been considered as the most influential under the President. This has been so much the case that many have not hesitated to call the Secretary of State the chief minister. At the present moment, May, l862, the gentleman who is at the head of the War Department has, I think, in his own hands greater power than any of his colleagues.
It will probably come to pass before long that one special minister will be the avowed leader of the cabinet, and that he will be recognized as the chief servant of the States under the President.
Our own cabinet, which now-a-days seems with us to be an institution as fixed as Parliament and as necessary as the throne, has grown by degrees into its present shape, and is not in truth nearly so old as many of us suppose it to be. It shaped itself, I imagine, into its present form, and even into its present joint responsibility, during the reign of George III. It must be remembered that even with us there is no such thing as a constitutional Prime Minister, and that our Prime Minister is not placed above the other ministers in any manner that is palpable to the senses. He is paid no more than the others; he has no superior title; he does not take the highest rank among them; he never talks of his subordinates, but always of his colleagues; he has a title of his own, that of First Lord of the Treasury, but it implies no headship in the cabinet. That he is the head of all political power in the nation, the Atlas who has to bear the globe, the god in whose hands rest the thunderbolts and the showers, all men do know. No man's position is more assured to him.
But the bounds of that position are written in no book, are defined by no law, have settled themselves not in accordance with the recorded wisdom of any great men, but as expediency and the fitness of political things in Great Britain have seemed from time to time to require. This drifting of great matters into their proper places is not as closely in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of the American people as it is with our own. They would prefer to define by words, as the French do, what shall be the exact position of every public servant connected with their government; or rather of every public servant with whom the people shall be held as having any concern. But nevertheless, I think it will come to pass that a cabinet will gradually form itself at Washington as it has done at London, and that of that cabinet there will be some recognized and ostensible chief.
