And here the practice of Ministers varies exceedingly.  Lord Salisbury writes almost everything with his own hand.  Mr. Balfour dictates 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”—­the Minister, profoundly ignorant of the whole subject, smiling blandly or gazing earnestly from his padded chair; the Permanent Official at his elbow murmuring what the “practice of the department” has been, what his predecessor said on a similar occasion ten years ago, and why the object of the deputation is equally mischievous and impossible; and the Minister finally expressing sympathy and promising earnest