Is in the Strand—or in Westminster—and the contrast between its silence and stillness and the bustle of the streets is something wonderful. You feel as you enter as if you were in a charmed land. With Tennyson’s lotus-eaters you exclaim, “There is no joy but calm. Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?” Charles Lamb’s description of the South Sea House might have been penned for a Government Office. The place seems to belong not to the living present. The windows, double glazed, keep out the roar of the outside world. The chairs and tables, of massive mahogany, seem as if of the time of the ancients. The Turkey carpet has a smack of the primitive political Eden, ere man sinned, and Lord John Russell introduced his Reform Bill. This may be a railroad age, but it is not in a Government Office that that truth is recognised. The young men are generally reading the papers, or eating lunch; the seniors are doing the same, but in a more dignified manner. In an office where there are several, to find a couple at real hard work from ten till four is, I fear, a rarity.

According to Mr. Knight, when Henry VIII. had stripped Wolsey of Whitehall, and other possessions, he constructed there, for the amusement of his leisure, a tennis-court, a bowling-green, and a cock-pit. The tennis-court and the bowling-green have left no traces. The cockpit went through a variety of transmutations, till it settled down into a treasury. In the reign of Anne, the lord high treasurer Godolphin sat three or four times a week at the cock-pit, “to determine and settle matters relating to the public treasure and revenues.” This was the old building fronting the banqueting house, which Mr. Barry has recently metamorphosed into a magnificent wing of his uniform edifice. The old office of Godolphin, however, is but a small part of the modern treasury. The offices of the more important functionaries are in the large building behind, which fronts the esplanade in St. James’s Park. Several offices were destroyed in 1733, in order to erect the present building facing the parade, the expense of which was estimated at £9,000. The faÇade consists of a double basement of the Doric order, and a projection in the centre, on which are four Ionic pillars supporting an entablature and pediment.

Where the treasury of the kings of England had its abiding place—or, more properly, where its eidolon or Platonic idea lodged, before it took up its abode in the cock-pit—were hard to say. The exchequer, which in the reign of Edward I. was literally the king’s strong box, was, in his time, lodged in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. Sir Francis Palgrave says, that the earliest place of deposit for the royal treasures which can be traced is “that very ancient apartment, described as the ‘Treasure in the cloisters of the Abbey in Westminster, next the Chapter-house,’ and in which the pix is still contained. This building is a vaulted chamber, supported by a single pillar; and it must remain with the architectural antiquary to decide why a structure in the early Romanesque style, ranging with the massy semicircular arch in the south transept, acknowledged to be a portion of the structure raised by the Confessor, may not also have been erected in the reign of the last legitimate Anglo-Saxon king. In this treasury the regalia and crown jewels were deposited, as well as the records. The ancient double oak doors, strongly grated and barred with iron, and locked with three keys, yet remain.”

The theory of the British treasury was much the same during the nomad period of its existence that it has continued to be in its settled and citizen-like life. There was from the beginning a treasurer, whose office it was to devise schemes for raising money, to manage the royal property to the best advantage, and to strike out the most economical and efficient modes of expenditure. He had even then the control of all the officers employed in collecting the customs and royal revenues, the disposal of offices in the customs throughout the kingdom, the nomination of escheators in the counties, and the leasing of crown lands. Then, as a check upon the malversion of this officer, there was the exchequer, the great conservator of the revenues of the nation. “The exchequer,” said Mr. Ellis, clerk of the pells, when examined before the finance commissioners, “is at least coeval with the Norman Conquest, and has been from its earliest institution looked to as a check upon the lord high treasurer, and a protection for the king, as well as for the subject, in the custody, payment, and issue of the public money.”

This is still the broad outline of the treasury—of the finance department of the State of Great Britain. The enormous magnitude of the empire has caused the subordinate departments of customs, the mint, &c., to expand until they have attained an organisation, an individual importance, a history of their own. The different modes of transacting money-business, rendered necessary by its greater amount and more complicated nature, have altered the routine both of the treasury and the exchequer; the changed relations of king and parliament have subjected the treasury and exchequer to new control and superintendence. Still their mutual relations, and the part they play in the economy of the empire, remain essentially the same as in older times.

The lords commissioners of the treasury (for the office of lord high treasurer has for many years been put in commission) have their office at Whitehall, in the building whose history we have briefly traced. The exchequer, or more properly “the receipt of exchequer,” has its office at Whitehall Yard. But we must not descend to particulars. The only place in the wide world where change comes not—where the main object seems to be how not to do it—where antiquated routine has its stronghold—is a government office.

Those of our readers who have read—and who has not?—Captain Marryatt’s graphic descriptions of seafaring life, entitled “The King’s Own,” will remember the scene in which Captain Capperbar ingeniously manages to supply, from the ship’s stores, all his own and her ladyship’s domestic wants. The ship’s carpenters are engaged in framing chests of drawers, and building dining-tables. Fully aware of the mischievous effects of idleness, the captain’s lady finds employment for the ship’s painters in her attics. The armourers, instead of preparing the murderous weapons of war, are peacefully occupied in making rakes and hoes for the especial benefit of the junior members of the same devoted family. Does the fair spouse of the gallant captain need even a pole for the clothes-line, a boat-mast is immediately dedicated to that important service. Thus, the captain turns his devotion for his country to some account; and if his patriotism be a virtue, it is one that brings with it its own reward.

Granting, which we readily do, that the above scene is an exaggeration, still we believe it to be nearer the mark than the opposite representations, which would lead us to believe that all persons in the employ of Government are overworked and underpaid. Their places are sinecures; bread for life. Every merchant or employer of labour has the power of instant dismissal; but in Government offices this great check on idleness and stupidity is ignored. Officials are happy fellows. The ills of life do not affect them. Mills may stop, panics may take place, commerce may decline, ships may rot in deserted harbours; docks and warehouses, once teeming with busy life, may be silent as the grave—but their income knows no change, save when death causes a general promotion in their ranks. The agricultural mind may be weighed down with grief—it may find its idols but clay. There, where it must live, or bear no life, it may find all hollow, delusive, and false. The seasons may be unpropitious. The common ills farmers are heir to, such as potato disease, the fly at the turnips, the rot in the sheep, may be theirs in no common degree; nevertheless, the Clapham omnibus duly deposits at the Treasury in Downing-street Mr. Smith, who, with the exception of two hours for lunch, and another hour or so for miscellaneous conversation, and the perusal of the Times, will, from ten till four, magnanimously devote himself to his country’s good. At the hour of four, Mr. Smith is again on the omnibus, about to seek, in the bosom of his family, that relaxation which, did his country deny him, it would be ungrateful indeed. Mr. Smith is a family man; and, regardless of London temptations, he hastens to his mutton at five. On the contrary, the junior clerk, Mr. Adolphus Blaser, is a young man about town; and just as Mr. Smith retires to his night’s rest, our young rouÉ, having recovered from the effects of a good dinner, is ready to commence the diversions, or, as they may be more fitly termed, the follies of a night. At a good old age Mr. Smith is gathered to his fathers, and a tombstone in Norwood Cemetery calls upon the public to admire those virtues, the loss of which has left such a blank in the Clapham annals of domestic life. One of Mr. Smith’s companions, a much-maligned individual, has just written to the Times, indignantly asking if it be nothing to attend every day at Somerset-house, in wet weather or fine? But, upon the whole, we think few men were more fortunate than our deceased friend. Like many of his schoolfellows, he did not make and lose a fortune; his hair did not become prematurely grey. There were storms, but they never reached him. He never missed his church: he had always a friend, and a bottle to give him; for your true Church and King man is generally reared on fine old port. His sons were placed in his office; and his daughters (good-looking, as most of the daughters of well-to-do, jolly old gentlemen, generally are) settle comfortably in life. And so endeth the chapter.

If this imaginary sketch be not true, it is not far from the truth. A Government situation is known to be a pleasant berth, and is jumped at as a man would jump at a freehold estate or a lump of Californian gold. A man who has any influence with the powers that be, or a younger son, instead of trying a trade or profession, will often seek a Government situation, trusting, with the income arising from it, he may live in town almost in idleness—at any rate in comparative luxury and ease. By the side of a Rothschild he may be poor, but really he is not so badly off, after all. The life of a Government employÉ is considered gentlemanly, easy, and not under-paid. Hence the doors of those who have places to dispose of are furiously besieged by an eager and avaricious mob. The higher offices are equally greedily seized, and equally as preposterously over-paid. During one of the recent examinations before the committee of the House of Commons, a quondam ambassador had the coolness to inform the committee that the reason why the American ambassadors managed to perform their duties for less money than the English ones was, that they lived so much more economically; as if economy were a crime, and a thing to be shunned by any of the numerous representatives of John Bull: and one celebrated ambassador does not see how diplomacy can be carried on at all unless the money of the nation be lavished on banquets, such as even Soyer might envy and admire.

This is the climax of absurdity; and the time has come for such absurdity to be treated with merited contempt. The axe must be laid at the root of the tree. A reduction of salaries commensurate with the increased cheapness of living, and with the difficulties the tax-payers have in meeting the tax-gatherers’ demands, must be made at once. It is childish to suppose that such a man as Mr. Bancroft was less respected at Paris than the Marquis of Normanby, or that Lord Cowley would less powerfully represent England were his salary of £10,000 cut down to £2,000. A thoughtful man can see, in the glitter and glare of gilded saloons, filled with flunkies and worshippers of the golden calf, nothing very creditable, or worthy of admiration. At the same time it must be remembered that, if the nation has efficient service, it is not grudging as regards expense.