Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/692

620 the ministerial bench in the Commons, and a new principle was introduced, that the representatives of what are called the spending departments that is, the Secretary of State for War and the First Lord of the Admiralty should, if possible, be members of the House which votes the supplies, Mr Disraeli followed this precedent. Although the Government of this country is one of extreme publicity, it is to the credit of the good sense and good faith of Englishmen that the deliberations and pro ceedings of the Executive Government are veiled in impene trable secrecy, until the moment when the result of them is made known. Beyond the meagre announcement in the Court Circular of the bare fact that a Cabinet has been held, and that certain ministers were present, nothing .is communicated to the public. Cabinets are usually con voked by a summons addressed to &quot; Her Majesty s Confi dential Servants,&quot; by direction of the Prime Minister; and the ordinary place of meeting is the Foreign Office, but they may be held anywhere. No secretary or other officer is present at the deliberations of this council. No official record is kept of its proceedings, and it is even considered a breach of ministerial confidence to keep a private record of what passed in the Cabinet, inasmuch as such memoranda may fall into other hands. But on some important occasions, as is known from the Memoirs of Lord Sidmouth, the Correspondence of Earl Grey with King William IV., and from Sir Robert Peel s Memoirs, published by per mission of the Queen, Cabinet minutes are drawn up and submitted to the sovereign, as the most formal manner in which the advice of the ministry can be tendered to the Crown and placed upon record. More commonly, it is the duty of the Prime Minister to lay the collective opinion of his colleagues before the sovereign, and take his or her pleasure on public measures and appointments. The sovereign never presides at a Cabinet, and at the meetings of the Privy Council, where the sovereign does preside, the business is purely formal. It has been laid down by some writers as a principle of the British Constitution that the sovereign is never present at a discussion between the advisers of the Crown ; and this is, no doubt, an established fact and practice. But like many other political usages of this country it originated in a happy accident. King William and Queen Anne always presided at weekly Cabinet Councils. But when the Hanoverian princes ascended the throne, they knew no English, and were barely able to converse at all with their ministers ; for George I. or George II. to take part in, or even to listen to, a debate in council was impossible. When George III. mounted the throne the practice of the independent deliberations of the Cabinet was well established, and it has never been departed from. In no other country has this practice been introduced, and perhaps this is one reason why in many instances constitutional government has failed to take root. Differences of opinion, of course, occur in all bodies of men, and arguments are frequently presented with greater ability and temper in private than in public debate. These differences are decided in the Cabinet, as in all committees of council, by the majority of votes, and the rule holds good in all of them that no man shall make publication of how the minority voted &quot; The vote once taken and the question decided, every member of the Cabinet becomes equally responsible for the decision, and is equally bound to support and defend it. A decided difference of opinion cannot be persisted in or publicly expressed without withdrawing from the Cabinet, as when Mr Gladstone quitted Sir Robert Peel s administration upon the proposal to endow Maynooth. Hence it arises that resignations, or threats of resignation, are much more common than the public imagine ; arid a good deal of tact and management is continually exercised in reconciling these differences. A serious &quot; division in the Cabinet &quot; is, as is well known, an infallible sign of its approaching dissolution. There are cases in which a minister has been dismissed for a departure from the con certed action of his colleagues. Thus, in 1851, Lord Palmerston having expressed to the French ambassador in London his unqualified approbation of the coup d etat of Louis Napoleon against the Assembly, when the Cabinet had resolved on observing a strict neutrality on the subject, Lord Russell advised Her Majesty to withdraw from Lord Palmerston the seals of the Foreign Department, and his lordship never again filled that office. A clause was introduced into the Act of Settlement of 1705 requiring all Acts of State to be transacted in the Privy Council and signed by all the members present. This provision was found to be inconvenient, and was repealed two years afterwards. According to modern usage only one kind of public document is signed by all the mem bers of the Cabinet, as privy councillors, and that is the order for general reprisals which constitutes a declara tion of war. Such an order was issued against Russia in 1854, and was signed by all the members of Lord Aber deen s Cabinet. Upon the resignation or dissolution of a ministry, the sovereign exercises the undoubted prerogative of selecting the person who may be thought by the Court most fit to form a new Cabinet. In several instances the statesmen selected by the Crown have found themselves unable to accomplish the task confided to them. But in more favour able cases the minister chosen for this supreme office ly the Crown has the power of distributing all the political offices of the Government as may seem best to himself, subject only to the ultimate approval of the sovereign. The First Minister is therefore in reality the author and constructor of the Cabinet ; he holds it together ; and in the event of his retirement, from whatever cause, the Cabinet is really dissolved, even though its members are again united under another head, as was the case when Lord Melbourne succeeded Lord Grey in 1834, and when Mr Disraeli succeeded Lord Derby in February 1868. Each member of the Cabinet, in fact, holds office under the First Lord of the Treasury, and in the event of resignation it is to him that the announcement of such an intention should be made.

1em  CABIRI ([ Greek ]), in Mythology, usually identified with the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux), in common with whom they were styled /^cyaXot eoi (magni Dii), and had the power of protecting life against storms at sea, the symbol of their presence being the St Elmo fire. The worship of the Cabiri was local and peculiar to the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Samothrace, extending also to the neighbour ing coast of Troy, in which places it appears to have been inherited from a primitive Pelasgic population. It was, however, in Samothrace that this worship attained its chief importance, coming first into notice apparently after the Persian war, and from that time extending its influence doivn into the Roman period. The point of attraction was in the religious Mysteries, initiation into which was sought for, not only by large numbers of pilgrims, but also by such persons of distinction as Philip and Olympias the parents of Alexander, his successor Lysimachus, Arsinoe, and those Roman commanders whose duties led them to that quarter. 