raine of which to each holder amounts to £200 a year for four years have cost the Colony during the last five years, on average $1456.25, but the actual expenditure of the year 1891 was $2268.52 cents, and the estimated expenditure of the present year is set down at $2680.00.
As the scholarship is not linked to youths born and bred in the Colony, and as the holder of the Scholarship is not required ever to return to the Colony to practise his profession here, the Colony cannot be said to receive any benefit from these Scholarships beyond the above-mentioned educational advantages.
But neither can it be said that the Legal, Medical or Engineering professions of the Colony derive any benefit from these scholarships.
Though the public benefits attaching to these scholarships are therefore small, the expenditure is also small, when compared with the resources of the Colony.
No scheme of educational expenditure would derive any present help from a stoppage of these scholarships, as the scholarships now held, and the Scholarship to be given away on the basis of the next examination, cannot be justly interfered with, and therefore a suspension of this Scholarship scheme would have its earliest effect partially at the close of the year 1894 and fully at the close of the year 1896, and not sooner.
The only consideration that might raise the question of the advisability of continuing the working of this scholarship Scheme appears to me to be the proportion of expenditure devoted to ordinary and pressing educational needs.