This Estimate falls under three heads. The first is allowances for governors. We always estimate on the assumption that no unexpected retirements will take place, but unfortunately several governors had to retire on grounds of ill-health. That means that we have not only the expenses of a new governor going out, but the expenses of the retiring governor coming home. Then there is the further expense of the transfer of the best officer who can be found to fill the vacancy. It actually means that we get eight or nine cases of expenditure where there would not be any expenditure in the ordinary course. All this expenditure is on the prescribed scale. Another item is for £5,500 for boundary commissions. Anyone who occupies this office knows how difficult it is to estimate the cost of a boundary commission. You do not know until you are on the spot exactly how long and detailed the work will be. In the first case where we underestimated, a great deal of extra work had to be done because it was found that data on which the Commission were working, which was collected in 1927, was inaccurate, and some of the work had to be done over again. In the case of the Ethiopian boundary, a German employed by the Ethiopians was unhappily murdered. He was their technical expert and it was discovered that most of his notes were in a shorthand which nobody could read. The best help which the British side of the commission could give inevitably involved doing a good deal of the work over again.

The extra sum in the case of British Guiana is, I regret to say, due to illness on our side, a number of members of the Commission becoming ill and having to be withdrawn. The extra amount for the Middle Eastern Services is mainly due to the delimitation of the frontier between Yemen and the Aden Protectorate, which has resulted from the very satisfactory mission which was undertaken by Sir Bernard Reilly. I need not go into the details, but those interested will remember that for many years it had been a cause of great dissatisfaction and difficulty that the frontier had not been properly delimited. Sir Bernard Reilly went on this special mission and he arrived at a complete agreement on which a Treaty has now been made, and I think I may say with confidence that the result of that is not only the establishment of thoroughly friendly relations' between the Imam and the Aden Protectorate but a really satisfactory system obtaining through all the Protectorate. That is a most satisfactory conclusion and one which, I venture to say, is cheap at the price.