THE themes of the Northcote–Trevelyan Report – merit measured by competitive examinations instead of patronage – came to be expressed in the report of the Haldane Committee and the formation of the Cabinet Office. These themes formed aspects of the skeins of warp and woof of the secular formation of the liberal state in the twentieth century. Keynes, in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, made a self-conscious reference to the beginning of St. John's Gospel when he observed how sometimes words do not become flesh. Indeed, the processes of central government were sometimes awkward and obscure in the nineteenth century. Some Prime Ministers were more systematic than others. Mr. Gladstone, when he was in Downing Street, mustered his secretaries into a kind of secretariat to manage his business. Institutional looseness often relied on the personality and deftness of the likes of Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone, and Salisbury to hold together what one scholar has called the “ghost” of the British constitution.

Such an unsystematic system might be tolerable in normal times. In times of need, however, it was not. The turmoil of party instability in the 1850s, the Crimean War, the South African War, and the Great European War revealed the weakness of such arrangements. However, it was forever present. In 1882, for example, Chamberlain and Harcourt went to Lord Hartington because they were puzzled about a Cabinet meeting after which John Bright resigned from the Cabinet. Lord Hartington's secretary wrote to Edward Hamilton, then one of Mr. Gladstone's secretaries and later a Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, to ask what happened. He wrote: “My chief has told me to ask you what the devil was decided, for he was damned if he knows. Will you ask Mr. G. in more conventional and less pungent terms?”