Newcastle had always intended this and nothing else. As Hardwicke judiciously wrote, two days before Newcastle saw Fox: 'If the power of the Treasury, the Secret Service and the House of Commons is once well settled in safe hands, the office of Secretary of State of the Southern province will carry very little efficient power along with it.' Fox was to be Secretary for the Southern province. But the Duke's plan of campaign had the radical defect of making the post of manager impossible. For the difference between the modern term of 'leadership' and the denomination of 'management' was no mere verbal distinction. The House of Commons had to be managed by acts of a kind more material than the eloquence of a chief, or the seductive hints of whips. The leader, in fact, combined the leadership with the office of Patronage Secretary. 'The House of Commons must have,' as Fox explained on a subsequent occasion, 'at least one man in it who shall be the organ of His Majesty's parliamentary wishes, and known to be able to help or hurt people with His Majesty.'[251] The leader would not know how to talk to his followers, when some might be hirelings and some free, without his knowing which were which. He would not be able to promise a borough or a place. He would be a mere speaking automaton with a wary old chief in concealment working the machine. Fox saw that he was cheated. He himself seems to have clung for a moment even to the shadow of office which Newcastle had proffered. But his friends insisted on his refusal. So on the next day or the next day but one, he wrote a curt letter, stating that the assurances conveyed to him through Lord Hartington had been entirely contradicted by Newcastle at their interview, and that he preferred to remain Secretary at War. 'I remain therefore,' he wrote to Marlborough, 'a little little man, which I think is better than a little great man.'[252] But he soon repented, or his friends did for him.[253]