One of the busiest of Ministers is the President of the Board of Trade. The work of the department is most diversified. It covers all matters affecting trade and commerce, industries and manufactures, the mercantile marine, and commercial relations with foreign countries. The salary of the President, formerly £2,000, was raised to £5,000 in 1909. Attached to the Board of Trade are a Parliamentary Secretary and a Secretary of Mines (created in 1920), both of whom are paid £1,500 a year. The Board of Trade holds a titular position that distinguishes it from the other Government departments. It was constituted in 1786 for the consideration of all matters relating to trade and foreign plantations. As a board it is a relic of olden and more leisurely times when much of the work done by the heads of the departments and chief clerks was revised by commissioners seated round a board or table. Now, however, only the name survives. The Board of Trade never meets. It had, as ex-officio members such exalted personages as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and also one whose office came to an end as long ago as 1800—the Speaker of the Irish Parliament. When Mr. Lloyd George was President of the Board of Trade he was asked whether the Archbishop of Canterbury had attended any meetings of the Board, and in an amusing equivocation replied that his Grace “had not missed a single meeting to which he had been summoned.” Sydney Buxton, another President of the Board of Trade, was asked why the place of the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons on the Board had not been filled up. “After keeping open his place for more than a century,” he replied, “I should be sorry now to close the door to his possible return to the Board.” He added, amid the renewed laughter of the House, “that he should also greatly regret losing the Archbishop of Canterbury as a colleague.”