The Administration includes three offices of high standing, having little if any departmental duties, but carrying salaries of £2,000 each, which are usually given to elderly men of long service, so that the Cabinet might have the advantage of their ripe experience and sage councils. The first in dignity is the Lord President of the Council. He presides at the meetings of the Privy Council; but practically the only occasion on which all its members are summoned is at the demise of the Crown, when it becomes the duty of that ancient body to meet for the purpose of proclaiming the accession of the new Sovereign. Formerly the Lord President was the chairman of certain committees of the Privy Council, which no longer exist. In 1837, when Lord John Russell took the first step to establish a system of national education, a Committee of the Privy Council was appointed to administer the moneys which Parliament voted for the purpose, and at its deliberations the Lord President presided. In 1855 a new office was created—that of Vice-President of the Council—which in time became vested with the control of education, and that, too, disappeared when the Board of Education, with a Minister at its head, was created in 1902. In like manner, the duties of the Privy Council in regard to trade were transferred to the Board of Trade, and its duties in regard to public health were transferred to the Local Government Board. Again, the Lord President supervised the exercise of the statutory powers of the Privy Council in connection with the prevention of cattle disease; but the creation of a Board of Agriculture took that work out of his hands and left him without any business, save that of the nominal supervision of the administrative functions of the Privy Council. The office of Lord Privy Seal is a survival from the historic past when the Privy Council sought to restrain executive acts of the Crown by insisting that the Lord Chancellor should not affix the imprimatur of the Great Seal to any grant, or patent, or writ which the Sovereign desired to issue, without their authorization in the form of a warrant under the Privy Seal. In these days of Government by Parliament, the Lord Privy Seal has nothing to do. Another office of dignity rather than of responsibility is that of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. His duties in relation to the revenues of the Duchy, which are vested in the Sovereign and exempt from parliamentary control are purely nominal, so that he is free to come to the assistance of any Minister when hard pressed in Parliament, or by departmental work outside. “So far from resembling an epicurean divinity,” said Lord Dufferin in 1871, when some noble lords called his position a sinecure, “the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster seems to me to be a kind of charwoman and maid-of-all-work to the Government.” 4