the Secretary to the Federated Malay States Resident-General containing the words "candidate eligible for promotion". There is no vestige of such a prospect held out in any of our communications on the subject and we cannot be bound by unauthorised statements made by officers of other Governments.
7. In the 5th paragraph of his letter Mr. Irving confuses an officer who is in the line of promotion with an office which is in the line of promotion. It does not follow that, because an officer is appointed to an office in the usual line of promotion, the officer who fills that office is in the line of promotion: otherwise Mr. Hazeland and the other officers who hold Cadet offices which are in the line of promotion might therefore claim to be promoted to higher Cadet posts. If a senior officer in the covenanted service of the Straits Settlements or Federated Malay States had accepted the post, he would have been eligible for promotion because he was a Cadet.
8. Again, whilst on the one hand Mr. Irving may not have received a hint that he was ruining his prospects in the public service by accepting his present appointment, on the other hand the Cadets of this Service did not receive a hint that the appointment of a non-Cadet to that office would give him a Cadet's preferential claim to higher Cadet Offices. It was a bad enough blow to Hongkong Cadets to have a non-Cadet put into a Cadet Office: it would be a worse blow to have that non-Cadet's claim to higher Cadet posts allowed. Mr. Irving's proper course to retrieve official ruin is to ask to be transferred back to the Service whence he came.
9. There was no contract, express or implied with Mr. Irving to give him promotion in this Colony