Much of a Minister’s comfort and success depends upon his Private Secretary.  Some Ministers import for this function a young gentleman of fashion whom they know at home—­a picturesque butterfly who flits gaily through the dusty air of the office, making, by the splendour of his raiment, sunshine in its shady places, and daintily passing on the work to unrecognized and unrewarded clerks.  But the better practice is to appoint as Private Secretary one of the permanent staff of the office.  He supplies his chief with official information, hunts up necessary references, writes his letters, and interviews his bores.

When the late Lord Ampthill was a junior clerk in the Foreign Office, Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, introduced an innovation whereby, instead of being solemnly summoned by a verbal message, the clerks were expected to answer his bell.  Some haughty spirits rebelled against being treated like footmen, and tried to organize resistance; but Odo Russell, as he then was, refused to join the rebellious movement, saying that whatever method apprized him most quickly of Lord Palmerston’s wishes was the method which he preferred.  The aggrieved clerks regarded him as a traitor to his order—­but he died an ambassador.  Trollope described the wounded feelings of a young clerk whose chief sent him to fetch his slippers; and in our own day a Private Secretary, who had patiently taken tickets for the play for his chief’s daughters, drew the line when he was told to take the chief’s razors to be ground.  But such assertions of independence are extremely rare, and as a rule the Private Secretary is the most cheerful and the most alert of ministering spirits.

But it is time to return from this personal digression to the routine of the day’s work.  Among the most important of the morning’s duties is the preparation of answers to be given in the House of Commons, and it is often necessary to have answers ready by three o’clock to questions which have only appeared that morning on the notice-paper.  The range of questions is infinite, and all the resources of the office are taxed in order to prepare answers at once accurate in fact and wise in policy, to pass them under the Minister’s review, and to get them fairly copied out before the House meets.  As a rule, the Minister, knowing something of the temper of Parliament, wishes to give a full, explicit, and intelligible answer, or even to go a little beyond the strict terms of the question if he sees what his interrogator is driving at.  But this policy is abhorrent to the Permanent Official.  The traditions of the Circumlocution Office are by no means dead, and the crime of “wanting to know, you know,” is one of the most heinous that the M.P. can commit.  The answers, therefore, as prepared for the Minister are generally jejune, often barely civil, sometimes actually misleading.  But the Minister, if he be a wise man, edits them into a more informing shape, and after a long and careful deliberation as to the probable effect of his words and the reception which they will have from his questioner, he sends the bundle of written answers away to be fair-copied and turns to his correspondence.