ictates to a
shorthand clerk. Most Ministers write a great deal by their Private
Secretaries. Letters of any importance are usually transcribed into a
copying-book. A Minister whom I knew used to burn the fragment of
blotting-paper with which he had blotted his letter, and laid it down as
an axiom that, if a constituent wrote and asked a Member to vote for a
particular measure, the Member should on no account give a more precise
reply than, "I shall have great pleasure in voting in the sense you
desire." For, as this expert observed with great truth, "unless the
constituent has kept a copy of his letter--and the chances are twenty to
one against that--there will be nothing to prove what the sense he
desired was, and you will be perfectly safe in voting as you like." The
letters received by a Minister are many, various, and surprising. Of
course, a great proportion of them relate to public business, and a
considerable number to the affairs of his constituency. But, in addition
to all this, lunatics, cranks, and impostors mark a Minister for their
own, and their applications for loans, gifts, and offices of profit
would exhaust the total patronage of the Crown and break the Bank of
England.

When the day's official papers have been dealt with, answers to
questions settled, correspondence read, and the replies written or
dictated, it is very likely time to go to a conference on some Bill with
which the office is concerned. This conference will consist of the
Minister in charge of the Bill, two or three of his colleagues who have
special knowledge of the subject, the Permanent Officials, the
Parliamentary draftsman, and perhaps one of the Law Officers. At the
conference the amendments on the paper are carefully discussed, together
with the objects for which they were presumably put down, their probable
effect, their merits or demerits, and the best mode of meeting them. An
hour soon passes in this kind of anticipatory debate, and the Minister
is called away to receive a deputation.

The scene is exactly like that which Matthew Arnold described at the
Social Science Congress--the large bare room, dusty air, and jaded
light, serried ranks of men with bald heads and women in spectacles; the
local M.P., like Mr. Gregsbury in _Nicholas Nickleby_, full of
affability and importance, introducing the selected spokesmen--"Our
worthy mayor; our leading employer of labour; Miss Twoshoes, a
philanthropic worker in all good causes"--th