62 THE BRITISH APPROACH TO POLITICS

feeling about Abyssinia caused the Foreign Secretaryship to
pass on to Mr. Eden. So, spasmodically, the country may affect
the choice of Cabinet Ministers.

When people speak of "the Government" they usually mean
the Cabinet. No important action of Government is taken,
except on its decision; no law is passed of which it disapproves,
and the majority of laws are its creation. Do the people, then, at
elections, hand over their destinies to a group of twenty men for *
the next four or five years? It looks very like it. "Hold your
processions and demonstrations,*' said Lord Birkenhead con-
temptuously to the Opposition in 1927, "we shall put this Bill
(the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Bill) through". Lord
Birkenhead could speak thus because the Conservative M.P.s
were solidly behind the Government, and the public outside
were not,overwhelmingly hostile. If either of these conditions
had been changed, the Government's policy would have changed
also. The first Unemployment Assistance Regulations of the
present Government were swept away by the people's hostility.
The Cabinet is entrusted with great power, but it is not a
dictatorship; still less is the Prime Minister, faced with the job
of holding the Cabinet together, a dictator.

NON-CABINET POSTS.

Outside the Cabinet is the rest of the Ministry; here are to be
found the Minister of Pensions, the Postmaster-General, the
Law Officers—Attorney-General and Solicitor-General, and for
Scotland a Lord Advocate and Solicitor-General; some members
of the Royal Household and a number of Under-Secretaries,
Parliamentary Secretaries and Financial Secretaries. Each of the
Secretaries of State has an Under-Secretary, and the other
Ministers have similar subordinates; Frequently, where the
Secretary is in the Commons, the Under-Secretary will be in
the Lords and vice verso, so that the Government may have a
spokesman for each Department in both Houses, Two types of
men occupy these positions. First, the young men who art