Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/690

Rh 666 PRECEDENCE marries the younger son of an earl, the eldest or younger son of { viscount or baron, a baronet, a knight, or an esquire, &e., she retains with her own precedence, the prefix &quot;lady&quot; before her Christiai name and her husband s surname. If the daughter of a viscoun marries the younger son of an earl or anybody of inferior rank to him, or the daughter of a baron marries the younger son of s viscount or anybody of inferior rank to him, she retains her owi precedence with the prefix &quot;honourable&quot; before the addition &quot;Mrs&quot; and his surname or Christian name and surname. But, if her bus band is a baronet or a knight, she is called the Honourable Lad} Smith or the Honourable Lady Jones, as the case may be. The wives of the younger sons of earls and of the eldest and youngei sons of viscounts and barons, if they are of inferior rank to their husbands, take their precedence and are described as the Honour able Mrs, with the surnames or Christian names and surnames o! their husbands following. It was because the judges were placed by James I. before the younger sons of viscounts and barons that they were accorded the title of &quot;honourable,&quot; and that they are designated as the Honourable Mr Justice Hawkins or the Honour able Mr Justice Stephen, instead of as Sir Henry Hawkins or Sir James Stephen, which would connote their inferior personal dignity of knighthood. But in this addition their wives do not participate since it is merely an official distinction. It is manifest on even a cursory examination of the tables we have given that, although they embody the only scheme of general precedence, whether for men or for women, which is authoritatively sanctioned or recognized, they are in many respects very imperfectly fitted to meet the circumstances and requirements of the present day. In both of them the limits prescribed to the royal family are pedantically and inconveniently narrow, and stand out in striking contrast to the wide and ample bounds through which the operation of the Royal Marriage Act (12 Geo. III. c. 11) extends the disabilities but not the privileges of the sovereign s kindred. Otherwise the scale of general precedence for women compares favourably enough with the scale of general precedence for men. If, indeed, it includes the queen s maids of honour and the wives of the companions of the knightly orders, there certainly does not seem to be any good reason why it should omit the mistress of the robes and the ladies of the bedchamber, or the ladies of the royal order of Victoria and Albert and the imperial order of the Crown of India. But these are trifling matters in themselves, and concern only an extremely minute fraction of the community. The scale of general precedence for men is now in substantially the same condition as that in which it has been for be tween two and three centuries, and the political, to say nothing of the social, arrangements to which it was framed to apply have in the interval undergone an almost com plete transformation. The consequence is that a good deal of it has come down to us in the shape of a survival, and has ceased to be of any practical use for the purpose it was originally designed to effect. While it comprises several official and personal dignities which are virtually obsolete and extinguished, it entirely omits the great majority of the members of Government in its existing form, and whole sections of society on a less exalted level^ to whom it is universally felt that some rank and place at all events are both in public and in private justly due. As we have already said, it accords no precedence what ever to the prime minister, whether as premier or as first lord of the treasury. In the same way it ignores not only the first lord of the admiralty but also the presidents of the Board of Trade and the Local Government Board, the post master-general, the vice-president of the council, and all the law officers of the crown. 1 And, when it does confess the &quot;There are no doubt certain public ceremonials of State such Coronations, Royal Public Funerals, and Processions of the Sovereign [lament, &c. ( wherein various public functionaries walk and have he occasion certain places assigned to them, but which they may alw, a v, 1 Si f &quot;I&quot; 18 Same aS [t by n means follows &quot;* *ey are always entitled to the same place for having been there once : there to a c rtain extent a precedent furnished thereby, and in some cases the uniformity of precedence in regard to one class over another presence of any of the sovereign s principal ministers, it commonly places them in positions which are out of all keeping with their actual eminence and importance. It ranks the lord president of the council and the lord privy seal before dukes, while it places the chancellor of the ex- chequer after the younger sons of earls and the eldest sons of barons, and the secretaries of state after the master of the horse and the vice-chamberlain of the household. The lord chancellor still has precedence as the first of the great officers of state, which was allotted to him not as what hu is, the head of the judicature, but as what he once was, the prime minister of the sovereign ; and the lord chief justice, who is next to him in regular judicial rank, as presiding over the Common Law Courts, as he presides over the Courts of Equity, is placed after the chancellors of the exchequer and of the duchy of Lancaster, who still have the precedence which was allotted to them not as ministers, which they are, but as judges, which they are no longer. Neither the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the viceroy of India, nor the governor-general of Canada has any rank or place at St James s, where, as well as at Westminster, the lord steward or the lord chamberlain of the household is a much greater and more splendid personage. Again, in the scale of general precedence there are no clergymen except bishops, no lawyers except judges, and no officers of either the army or the navy from field-marshals and admirals of the fleet downwards. Nor, of course, are any colonial governors or lieutenant-governors entered on it. It contains no mention of under-secretaries of state, chairmen or commissioners of administrative boards, comptrollers or secretaries of Govern ment departments, lord lieutenants or sheriffs of counties, deputy lieutenants or justices of the peace, members of the House of Commons, or graduates of the universities. It is true that among some of these classes definite systems of subordination are established by either authority or usage, which are carefully observed and enforced in the particular areas and spheres to which they have reference. But we have seldom any means of determining the relative value of a given term in one series as compared with a given term in another series, or of connecting the different steps in the scales of local, professional, or academical pre cedence with the different steps in the scale of general precedence, to which such scales of special precedence ought to be contributory and supplementary. We know, for example, that major-generals and rear-admirals are of equal rank, that with them are placed commissaries-general and inspectors-general of hospitals and fleets, that in India along with civilians of thirty-one years standing they immediately follow the vice-chancellors of the Indian uni versities, and that in relation to the consular service they immediately precede agents-general and consuls-general. But there is nothing to aid us in determining whether in England they should be ranked with, before, or after deans, queen s counsel, or doctors in divinity, who are as destitute as they are themselves of any recognized general precedence, and who, as matters now stand, would certainly have to give place to the younger sons of baronets and knights and the companions of the knightly orders. The subjoined tables of special precedence, although their authority would not always be admitted in the Col-
 * ias in such cases become established. This applies, for instance, to

, rown, and Masters and Six Clerks in Chancery, who have no definite or fixed place in the tables of precedency regulating the general orders of society, though in reference to State ceremonials they have certain r&amp;gt;laces assigned in the order of procession in right of their offices, vhich, however, give them no general rank. Upon such occasions, nevertheless, the legal rank and precedence which they hold in the Courts of Law is observed, and so far establishes among themselves, .nd in respect to their several classes, their precedency&quot; (Sir Charles Young, Order of Precedence, &c., pp. 59-61).
 * he places of the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, Law Officers of the