It is a mark of the hastiness of debate that the word responsibility has crept in here. No word in the political vocabulary is so dangerous, because none is so ambiguous. Properly speaking, a person is said to be responsible when he is liable to be called to account for his acts, a liability which implies that he is free to act in one way or another. These two aspects of the term, the liability and the freedom of choice implied, lead to its use in two opposite senses. Sometimes responsibility means that a man must answer for what he does, and sometimes that he may do as he pleases without being controlled by any one. The word is as often as not a synonym for authority. When Moltke speaks of the "immeasurable responsibility" of the King of Prussia, he really means that the King took upon himself as his own acts decisions of the gravest moment which were prompted by his advisers, and that by so doing he covered them as against the rest of the world; he did not mean that the King had to account for his conduct except to his own conscience and at the bar of history. A Secretary of State for War, in his relations with the army, wields the whole authority of the Government. The only thing which he cannot do is to act in opposition to the wishes of his colleagues, for if he did he would immediately cease to be Secretary of State. As long as they are agreed with him he is the master of the army. But his liability to be called to account is infinitely small. The worst that can happen to him is that if the party to which he belongs should lose its majority in the House of Commons the Cabinet of which he is a member may have to resign. That is an event always possible quite apart from his conduct, and his actions will as a rule not bring it about unless for other reasons it is already impending. Whenever, therefore, the phrase "the responsibility of the Secretary of State" occurs, we ought to substitute for it the more precise words: "the power of the Cabinet to decide any matter as it pleases, subject to the chance of its losing its majority." What Mr. Balfour deprecates is a single Commander-in-Chief, and it is important to grasp the real nature of his objection. If the whole business of the army be conceived to be a single department of which the Commander-in-Chief is the head, so that the authority of the Secretary of State extends to no other matters than those which lie within the jurisdiction of the Commander-in-Chief, then undoubtedly the Secretary of State and the Commander-in-Chief are each of them in a false position, for one of them is unnecessary. The Secretary of State must either simply confirm the Commander-in-Chief's decisions, in which case his position as superior authority is a mere form, or he must enter into the reasons for and against and decide afresh, in which case the Commander-in-Chief becomes superfluous. It is bad organization to have two men, one over the other, both to do the same business.