The New International Encyclopædia/Cabinet (advisers)

CABINET (originally the closet or private apartment of a monarch, in which he consults with his most trusted advisers; hence, sometimes as a term of contempt, those who frequent the king's closet. See Cabinet above). The collective body of official advisers of the executive head of the State. In modern times the term is usually limited to the ministers, or heads of the great departments of State, in a constitutional government, but there is no reason for restricting it to such heads of departments, nor in refusing the title to the chosen advisers of an absolute monarch. The powers and functions of cabinets vary greatly, even in modern constitutional States.

In England the Cabinet is virtually a committee of the House of Commons, and it constitutes the supreme executive authority of the realm. In the United States the term is applied to the group of executive heads of the Federal Government, who have no authority outside of their several departments, and whose function as Cabinet ministers is purely an advisory one. The Cabinets of the two countries are alike in this respect, however, that they are composed exclusively of the members of the dominant political party—a result insured in England by the fact that the Cabinet, being a committee of the legislature, is dependent on a party majority for its continuance in office, and in the United States by the assumed obligation of the President to appoint only members of his own political party to the chief offices of the State. In the constitutional governments of the Continent of Europe and in Japan, as well as in the self-governing British colonies, the model of the English Cabinet has usually been followed. There being in those countries, with the exception of Finance and Switzerland, no opportunity for the popular will to express itself directly in the choice of the chief executive, popular government is conceived of as signifying parliamentary government, and the attempt is made, with varying degrees of success, to secure to the legislature a substantial measure of executive power through a responsible Cabinet, subject to its control. It is only in Great Britain that this transfer of executive power from the titular head of the State to the legislature has become complete, and that we find Cabinet Government in its most highly developed form. In France, however, it is practiced with a large measure of success, and is completely accepted in theory, whereas, in most of the Continental States which have adopted the device of the parliamentary Cabinet, it is still imperfectly accepted and applied.

France is the only important instance of the adoption of Cabinet government by a republic. In the free States, in which the popular will finds expression in the choice of the head of the State, it has not usually been deemed necessary to deprive that head of his executive authority, nor to set up a competing executive, deriving its authority less directly from the people. Hence in Switzerland and the republic of the Western World, the American model—a Cabinet responsible not to the legislature, but to the President or Governor—has been adopted. In this system the Cabinet, as a body, has no official existence, the persons composing it being individually, and not collectively, responsible to the head of the State, and usually holding their offices as well as their advisory relation to him subject to his will. In the Federal Government of the United States this relation is clearly indicated in the phrase ‘the President's Cabinet,’ by which his official advisers are commonly referred to accordingly, the dismissal of a Cabinet minister, or even of the whole Cabinet, may be effected without altering the political complexion or the policy of the administration; whereas, under the English system, the Cabinet is ‘the Government,’ its members stand or fall together, and its dismissal involves, in the full sense of the phrase, a change of government.

The advantages and disadvantages of these two contrasting forms of popular government are elsewhere set forth (see Government; Parliament), but the fact should here be noticed that a Cabinet representing the legislature and responsible to it is necessarily deeply concerned in the legislative as well as in the executive business of the State. The British Ministry, representing the dominant political party in Parliament, has assumed complete control of legislation; and this, it is conceived, must always be the tendency of an executive so constituted and so related to the legislating body, whereas a Cabinet of the American type (even when made up, as it visually is, of party leaders), having no official relation to the legislative branch of the Government, is strictly confined to its foreign executive functions. In some of the foreign States which have adopted the American form of executive, the members of the Cabinet have a place—for purposes of discussion if not of voting—in the legislature; but in the United States the fear of impairing the mutual independence of the legislative and the executive departments of the Government has caused a similar tendency to be successfully resisted.

The President's Cabinet.—The Constitution of the United States made no provision for the creation of executive departments, but vested the sole executive power in the President. The several executive departments through which the President exercises this power have been created by successive acts of Congress, under the authority conferred by Art. I., Sec. 8, par. 18, of the Constitution, authorizing the Congress “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” At the first session of Congress, in 1789, the departments of State (first called Foreign Affairs), of the Treasury, and of War (which included naval as well as military affairs) were established; and the heads of these departments (called Secretaries of State, War, and the Treasury, respectively), together with the Attorney-General, who was then a part of the judicial establishment, constituted the first President's Cabinet. The office of Postmaster-General, created upon the organization of the post-office system in 1794, was not deemed of sufficient importance and dignity to entitle its incumbent to a seat in the President's councils, and it was not until 1829 that, by the action of President Jackson, the Postmaster-Generalship became a Cabinet office. In the meantime the Navy Department had been set apart from that of war, and the Secretary of the Navy created a Cabinet officer, in 1798. In the same way, fifty-one years later, the Department of Internal Affairs was set apart from the Department of State, and the office of Secretary of the Interior created and as recently as 1889 the Department of Agriculture was established, and its head, the Secretary of Agriculture, added to the list of Cabinet officers.

It is obvious that there is no natural order of precedence among the chiefs of the great executive departments of the Government, and prior to 1886 there was no legal discrimination between them. But in that year the succession of the members of the Cabinet to the Presidential office, in the event of the death or disability of both the President and Vice-President, was established by act of Congress, in the order in which they are named above. Even under this statute, however, there is no justification for the journalistic practice of referring to the Secretary of State as the ‘premier’ of the administration, there being no analogy between his position and that of the Prime Minister in a Cabinet of the English model. The President's Cabinet, therefore, consists of his officers of administration, whom he calls into consultation when he desires their advice. They hold their meetings in a room in his official residence, no record is kept of their proceedings, and he is not bound to heed their advice.

The British Cabinet.—There is a curious lack of correspondence between the legal and actual functions of the Cabinet in the Government of Great Britain. Legally it is merely a committee of the Privy Council, originally chosen by the King for advice “in his most secret affairs.” Actually it is, as has been said, the executive committee of the House of Commons, entirely independent of the Crown and of the Privy Council, and wielding the supreme authority of Parliament in the administration of the State. It has had a long and varied history. Prior to 1782 it contained honorary or ‘non-efficient,’ as well as active and ‘efficient’ members. Since that date it has been made up exclusively “of the persons whose responsible situations in office require their being members of it.” The number of these may vary somewhat, but modern usage has fixed the number at not less than eleven. These are usually the First Lord of the Treasury, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord President of the (Privy) Council, the Lord Privy Seal, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the five principal Secretaries of State, viz. for Home Affairs, for Foreign Affairs, for the Colonies, for India, and for War. To these may be added the Chief Secretary for Ireland, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Postmaster-General, the President of the Board of Trade, and one or two other high officials, but the tendency at present is to limit the number to the principal officers of State above enumerated. All of these officers of the Government are appointed on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, who makes up his Cabinet from among them, and who may or may not hold one or more of those offices himself. He presides at meetings of the Cabinet, but his preëminence gives him no legal control over that body or over its individual members. Its deliberations are secret, and it always acts as a unit, the defection of a member involving his retirement from the Cabinet and from the office held by him. All of its members are also members of one or the other of the Houses of Parliament and take part in the proceedings of that House.

The term ‘Cabinet’ is sometimes applied, by courtesy, in the United States, to the principal officials of a State Government, who may be called together by the Governor to advise him on questions of policy, and sometimes, in the same sense, the chief executive officers of a municipal government are called a ‘Mayor's Cabinet.’

The literature of the subject is very extensive and will be found more fully referred to under the general heads of Government and Parliament. The historical evolution of the British Cabinet and its relation to Parliament and the Crown are fully set forth in Anson, The Law and Custom of the Constitution (Oxford, 1892); and in Todd, On Parliamentary Government in England (2d ed., London, 1887). Interesting comparisons of the British and American systems of cabinet government are to be found in Bagehot, The English Constitution (London and Boston, 1873), and Bryce, The American Commonwealth (3d ed., London and New York, 1900).