Whatever the policy of the cabinet at any moment may be, the scale of expenditure is ultimately determined by the feeling in the House of Commons, and this in turn depends upon the state of public opinion. Except for a few short periods of extravagance, the seventy years that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars were marked by a decided tendency in favour of economy. People felt the pressure of taxation, worried little about the condition of the Army or the Navy, and had no strong desire to increase the expenses of the government in any direction. Latterly the tendency has been reversed. The country has felt rich; there have been a series of alarms about national defence, and at the same time the general growth of paternalism has brought in a desire for improvement and expenditure in many ways. [Sidenote: The Cabinet and the Ministry.] The ministry is composed, as has already been pointed out, of an inner part that formulates the policy of the government, and an outer part that follows the lines laid down; the inner part, or cabinet, containing the more prominent party leaders, who are also holders of the principal offices of state, while the outer part consists of the heads of the less important departments, the parliamentary under-secretaries, the whips and the officers of the royal household. All of these persons are strictly in the ministry, and resign with the cabinet; but the officers of the household have, as such, no political functions, and do not concern us here. The heads of departments without seats in the cabinet have become, with the increase in size of that body, very few. By far the greater part of the ministers outside of the cabinet are the parliamentary under-secretaries, who have two distinct sets of duties, one administrative and the other parliamentary. Their administrative duties vary very largely, mainly in accordance with personal considerations. Some of them are really active in their departments, doing work which might fall upon the parliamentary chief, or upon the permanent under-secretary, while others have little or no administrative business; but in any case the real object of their existence is to be found on the parliamentary side. Whatever duties, parliamentary or administrative, may be assigned to an under-secretary, he is strictly subordinate to his chief, who retains both the authority and the responsibility for the decision of all questions that arise in the department;[77:1] although an active under-secretary in the Commons may sometimes attract more public notice than his real chief in the Lords.