Moreover, if the salaries of office were meagre, statesmanship would become entirely an appendage of wealth. In former times most of the highest offices of the Government were filled by territorial magnates, Whig or Tory—members of aristocratic families with ample private means as well as great traditions of public service. To these men, possessed of personal fortunes of £15,000, £20,000 or £40,000 a year, the salaries of office may have been regarded as unconsidered trifles. And yet, strangely enough, in the seventeenth century, when rich noblemen, their relatives and dependants were at the head of affairs, the political seems to have been quite a lucrative profession, for a Minister often held his majority in the House of Commons together, not so much by principles, as by places and pensions. But the old custom of confining the highest of the offices of State exclusively to men of hereditary position and wealth and leisure came to an end by the middle of the nineteenth century. The tendency to open the arena of statesmanship to all members of the Party in power of proved ability and distinction, but irrespective of birth or rank or fortune, was strikingly shown in the Administration which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman formed in 1905, when John Burns, a manual worker from an engineering shipyard, was made President of the Local Government Board and a Cabinet Minister; and as this tendency is bound to become wider and wider still as time progresses, the salaries of Ministers must be at least sufficient to provide a livelihood in order to attract to the service of the State men well equipped for it in intellectual ability, and experience in affairs, but without private means. The fact, however, remains that the emoluments of office are not the allurement of the public service, and they never can be in any conceivable circumstances under the Party system, and the frequent changes of Government which it involves. Those who make politics a calling are very few in number. As a rule, men do not enter upon a political career with the object of making fortunes as statesmen, or even of securing a livelihood, in the way that men study medicine to become doctors, or law to become barristers. The uncertainty of attaining office and, in the event of success, the precariousness and brevity of its tenure will always make statesmanship the most unreliable of callings in the eyes of those bent on having a good balance at their bankers. The emoluments of office are really not so much salaries as prizes.