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mail without the risk of serious errors, and avoid those who could be so trusted, several are incapacitated by their liability to sea-sickness. The Marine Officer finds it difficult to provide any substitute for a single trip, moreover to perform tasks like keeping up a set of books or the like.
The result is that the Marine Officer naturally struggles as long as he can, rather than surrender a portion of his event for Salary, which an increased expense journey to Singapore involves. It makes it natural that the two Officers who could go should expect to be paid for going and for the attendant discomforts. Marine Sorting is scarcely an Entry which any Officer may reasonably be expected to make it worth the while of a colleague to relieve him. In the case of W Barrass, the Department lost a valuable officer in consequence of this.
It appears to me that a far less trying system, and one that would be in every way beneficial to the Department, would be introduced by having three Marine Officers instead of two, one to perform...