The present Lord President of the Council, the Marquess of Salisbury, is responsible to Parliament for two immensely important organizations: the Atomic Energy Authority and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Yet Lord Salisbury, one of the most important members of the present government, is not an elected representative of the people but sits in the House of Lords as a peer. The Lord Chancellor and the Law Officers are also members of the government. The Lord Chancellor is in fact a Minister of the Crown who is also head of the judiciary in England and Wales. The four Law Officers of the Crown are the Attorney General and the Solicitor General for England and Wales and the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor General for Scotland. Finally, there are Ministers of State--who are deputy ministers in departments where there is a heavy load of work or where, as in the case of the Foreign Office, the duties involve frequent overseas travel--and junior Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries, or Parliamentary Under Secretaries of State. The cabinet system, like so much else in British government, was not the result of Olympian planning. It "just growed." The Tudors began to appoint _ad hoc_ committees of the Privy Council. By the time of Charles II the Privy Council numbered forty-seven. There then developed an occasional arrangement in which a council of people in high office was constituted to debate questions of domestic and foreign affairs. Such committees or cabinets persisted until the reign of Queen Anne. Usually, but not always, they met in the presence of the sovereign. In 1717, George I, the first Hanoverian King, ceased to attend cabinet meetings. Until recently the accepted historical reason for this was the King's ignorance of English--a circumstance that might, one would think, enable him to bear long debates with fortitude. However, J.H. Plumb in his recent life of Sir Robert Walpole has suggested that the King's absence from the cabinet was due to a quarrel between the monarch and the Prince of Wales. At any rate, the cabinet system continued to flourish. Its members consistently ignored the provision in the Act of Settlements (1725) which forbade office-holders to sit in the Commons. The direct influence of the sovereign was reduced, although his indirect influence, as Lord North and "the King's Friends" demonstrated, was great. Nowadays the members of the cabinet are selected from the government by the Prime Minister. Usually it has fewer than twenty members. The cabinet determines the policy the government will submit to Parliament, it controls the national executive in accordance with policy approved by Parliament, and it co-ordinates and limits the authority of the departments of the government. In its operations the cabinet makes great use of the committee system, referring problems to one of the standing committees or to a temporary committee composed of the ministers chiefly concerned.