Synopsis. This No I allows in full, that is all but £200. to make the numbers round.). No II cuts it down to £20,000, because I did not understand Sir John Davis to mean that the whole of his Estimate of £24,000 has to be defrayed out of the new vote, it having been explained to him that there was a Surplus of old votes applicable to the Kowloon. It was a ground of complaint against him, that he did not give any account of the surplus in question, and left us to guess at the real state of it, and consequently at the actual amount of additional means required... under the head of public works. The reasons which led me to suppose £20,000 would be about the mark are stated in my report of the 6 December page J.
The average expenditure of recent years for Public Works, is much under this sum, and there was every reason to believe that a larger Vote of more than £20,000 for Public Works would only have added to the accumulation of cash balance, already unnecessarily large.