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been unable to secure candidates for the appointments
as Constables, and that we were communicating with the
Metropolitan Police.
Subsequently, as we explained in our previous
letter, we sent to the Colonial Secretary in response to a
request received from him extracts from letters from the Naval Employment Agency stating that no candidates had
come forward.
With reference to your suggestion that it might have precluded misunderstanding if we had sent this latter information before, we would observe that the amount of detail involved in the papers about appointments is so great that we cannot make a practice of sending out copies of all of them, and when the correspondence has been abortive and does not contain any substantial information likely to help the Colonial Government there is not usually any occasion for doing so. We are of course always happy to send out all the papers, whenever asked to do so, and on this occasion we at once supplied the particulars when called for by the Colonial Secretary.
Sir H. Blake however, in ascribing to us a wide departure from his instructions, appears to us to be taking the position that we had no authority to obtain the Constables from any other source than the Naval Employment Agency unless they have served in H.M.'s Navy, and if there has been any misunderstanding it has been on that point, but as we have explained above, our instructions did not seem to us to bear that meaning.
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