When, at an earlier period of political history, Sidney Herbert, Lord Herbert of Lea, resigned the War Office, Palmerston fixed upon Sir George Cornewall Lewis to succeed him, and argued the point with Lady Theresa Lewis, saying that the duties would not be military, but civil. “He would have to look after the accounts,” said the Prime Minister. “He never can make up his own,” replied the wife. “He will look after the commissariat,” said the Prime Minister. “He cannot order his own dinner,” replied the wife. “He will control the clothing department,” said the Prime Minister. “If my daughters did not give the orders to his tailor, he would be without a coat,” replied the wife. Cornewall Lewis, however, accepted the offer, and his Under-Secretary soon afterwards discovered him in Pall Mall reading a work on the military tactics of the Lycaonians. Sir Arthur Helps, the essayist, who was Clerk of the Privy Council, used to tell the story that once when there was a difficulty in finding a Colonial Secretary, Lord Palmerston said: “Well, I’ll take the colonies myself,” and presently remarked to Helps: “Just come upstairs with me for half an hour and show me where these places are on the map.” Charles James Fox is said to have confessed his ignorance of what Consols meant. He gathered from the newspapers that they were “things which rose and fell”; and he was always delighted when they fell, because he noticed, that for some unaccountable reason, it very much annoyed Pitt, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. That, no doubt, was Fox’s fun. But we are told of Lord Randolph Churchill, on the authority of his son and biographer, Winston Churchill, that when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Treasury returns worked out in decimal figures were laid before him, he inquired what “these damned dots” signified. I myself heard Sir Edward Carson, a distinguished lawyer, speaking as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1917, during the Great War, declare that he entered the Admiralty in a state of extreme ignorance. “Someone asked me the day I went there how I felt,” he went on to say, “and I said, ‘My only qualification is that I am absolutely at sea.’”