It appears to be widely supposed that Ministers of the Crown receive pensions on retirement. The position is that a Minister of the Crown may obtain a pension if he has held office for four or five years. But he is not entitled to it as a right on account of his service. He must apply for it to the First Lord of the Treasury, and make a declaration that his private income or resources are inadequate to the maintenance of the social position proper to one who has been a Minister of the Crown. Only two Members of the Government receive pensions automatically on retiring from office, the Lord Chancellor of England, whose pension is £5,000, and the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, whose pension is £4,000 a year. These two pensions are payable as a matter of course, however brief may have been the period of service. Nor is there any limitation to the number of such pensions that may be paid at the same time. At the close of the World War in 1918 there were living four ex-Lord Chancellors of England—Lord Halsbury, Lord Loreburn, Lord Haldane, and Lord Buckmaster—all of whom are paid the £5,000 a year, and a fifth, Lord Finlay, who, it was understood, waived his right to the retiring allowance. The other political pensions are, as I have said, conditional. Johnson felt it necessary to define the English use of the word “pension” as: “Pay given to a State hireling for treason to his country.” Johnson, however, afterwards did something to make this form of royal bounty respectable by himself accepting £300 a year from George III. Undoubtedly in the corrupt stage of political life during the eighteenth century there were numerous pensions and sinecure offices for Ministers who were needy, or simply greedy. A Committee of the House of Commons reported in 1802 that for twenty years previous a sum of £115,000 had been annually spent on pensions. But as political morality developed with the progress of the nineteenth century, or as the tax-payer grew impatient of his increasing burdens, this system of growing rich or repairing broken fortunes at the public expense gradually came to an end. The granting of political pensions was for the first time regulated by an Act passed by the Reform Government of Earl Grey in 1834—the “4 and 5 William V, c. 24,” which is described as an Act, “to alter, amend, and consolidate the laws for regulating pensions, compensations, and allowances to be made to persons in respect of their having held civil offices of his Majesty’s service.”