int, and no more was
said, thanks to the First Lord's timely remonstrance.

There was any amount of chatter at these musters; but on the other
hand one seldom seemed to find oneself much forrarder. That is the
worst of getting together a swarm of thinkers who are furnished with
the gift of the gab and are brimming over with brains. Nothing
happens. If a decision was by any chance arrived at, it was of a
non-committal nature. The spirit of compromise asserted itself and the
Committee adopted a middle course, a course which no doubt fits in
well with many of the problems with which governments in ordinary
times have to wrestle, but which does not constitute a good way of
conducting war.

The full Cabinet of twenty-three was carrying on _pari passu_ with the
Dardanelles Committee. It did undoubtedly take some sort of hand in
the prosecution of the war from time to time, because one day I was
summoned to stand by at 10 Downing Street when it was sitting, soon
after the Coalition Government was formed and when Lord Kitchener
happened to be away, on the chance of my being wanted. They were
hardly likely to require my services in connection with matters other
than military. After an interminable wait--during the luncheon hour,
too--Mr. Arthur Henderson, who was a very recent acquisition, emerged
stealthily from the council chamber after the manner of the
conspirator in an Adelphi drama, and intimated that they thought that
they would be able to get on without me. In obedience to an unwritten
law, the last-joined member was always expected to do odd jobs of this
kind, just as at some schools the bottom boy of the form is called
upon by the form-master to perform certain menial offices _pro bono
publico_.

The mystery observed in connection with these Cabinet meetings was not
unimpressive. But the accepted procedure--without a secretary present
to keep record of what was done and with apparently no proper minutes
kept by anybody--was the very negation of sound administration and of
good government. Such practice would have been out of date in the days
of the Heptarchy. Furthermore it did not fulfil its purpose in respect
to concealment, because whenever the gathering by any accident made up
its mind about anything that was in the least interesting, everybody
outside knew all about it within twenty-four hours. And in spite of
all the weird precautions, I actually was present once for a very
brief space of time at one of these