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GENERAL CONDITIONS OF SERVICE OF OFFICERS IN THE COLONIAL SERVICES.
Sir DONALD CAMERON: During the conversations that took place yesterday and this morning it seems to me we dis- cussed certain disabilities that arise owing to the fact that there is no single Colonial Service, and that, speaking generally, officers do not get the same opportunity, especially in the smaller Colonies to which Sir Joseph Byrne directed our attention.
Proposed Creation of an Imperial Scientific Service. I want to suggest a scheme that has been in my mind for a long time, and that is that we should try to get absolutely at grips with this question of an Imperial Scientific staff at least. I believe the mist and fog which we see before us, which have been induced by centuries of inaction and drift, will not prove to be so extraordinarily opaque if we get near enough to look at them. I can conceive quite easily in my mind, without any great diffi- culty, an Imperial Agricultural staff, with a director paid by the Colonies and attached to the Colonial Office. In that way we would pool the men, and, as stated in The Times this morning, we should pool that experience. 1 suggest we also should have a financial pool which would not necessarily amount to any very large sum, and which would not fall heavily upon the Colonies. From that pool we could supplement the salary of an officer who is detailed to go, for instance, to Seychelles, to make a special investigation: Seychelles might not be able to pay him £600, they would only be able to pay him £400, and the pool would pay the remainder. If we take a sufficiently wide view of it, the Legislative Councils of most of the Colonies might be induced to take the view that it is a question affecting the whole of tropical agricultural work and one of Imperial importance.
There is no doubt that some of the Colonies, particularly the Colonies in which I served in the early part of my career, might not come in, but, if we created a big agricultural corps, they could not get good officers from anywhere else. as that agricultural corps would have the tendency of attracting all the best men.
I believe the question of salaries on the lines I have indicated could be settled without very great difficulty.
The other standing objection is the question of pensions, and to that we are coming. If the Colonial Office take the same view on pensions in 1927 as was taken by the Colonial Office when the Report of the Pensions Committee of 1922-1924 was first sent to the Colonies in April. 1924, I believe the question can be, solved. It is not a very difficult one.
I should like to begin with the Imperial Agricultural Service and then it might be followed by-I am not sure whether it could be done with the doctors, nor am I certain that it is needed for the doctors an Imperial Survey, an Imperial Veterinary, and an Imperial Forestry Service. It is true that even on the technical side there are difficulties, and I am not sure that it is possible to have one service in all these cases, but I do not see why, if we take a sufficiently wide view of our obligations and of the position of the Colonial British Empire as a whole, the various territories should not be induced to make a small contribution-it would only be sanall-to a pool, which would get over a lot of the difficulties which we encounter HOW. It would indeed solve them.
There is another point in regard to agricultural research, to which Lord Lovat referred at some length, that proper notice must be given-four or five years if we are going to get the men. If we had a pool and recruited for that one service. that difficulty would be very largely remedied. I submit those views.
Mr. AMERY: That is a very important, practical, concrete suggestion. It will be very interesting indeed to hear the views of the Conference on it.
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Sir JOSEPH BYRNE 1 am speaking only for a very small Colony now. I think something of that kind will have to be done, as we are quite unable to carry on at present. Sir Donald referred to agriculture only, but if it could be extended to the medical service and to public works it would overcome great difficulties, not only in Seychelles but in other islands.
Mr. BAYNES: Could not the point be met by increasing the Imperial College of Agriculture at Trinidad? There is a nucleus there. It is a department which might serve the whole of the British Tropical Empire.
Mr. AMERY: There are two things that the College does: there is the Research Institution, and there is the Imperial Department. The essence of Sir Donald Cameron's sugges- tion would, of course, have to be localised here in this sense. that you would want a director or an adviser to the Secretary of State here. Of course it is here, too, that recruits come in. The object, I gather. of the whole scheine is first of all to improve the recruiting position by giving a real career to a man, they would all want to know at this end what their career was going to be, and they would be taken on at this end. and would then get spread out in the different parts of the Empire as their services were wanted. The agriculturalists would go in the first instance, I imagine, to Trinidad, and a certain number for research in agriculture might go to Amani. You may eventually have an institution in Ceylon or in Palestine, and they might go there in the first instance, or perhaps at some later stage. Those doing veterinary work would, I imagine, go to the main veterinary station in the Tropical Empire. The station at Kabete in Kenya may very well be the nucleus of our first big veterinary station. If that kind of movement is to be a function of the new service, it would hardly be possible to centralise it in the West Indies: it would have to be centralised here, and I doubt whether there would be any great advantage, except the continuity of name. by linking it up with the Imperial Department of Agriculture. which has always been a West Indies Department and which has rather shrunk owing to the development of the College at Trinidad.
Mr. COSTLE)-WHITE. Does it refer to research work or ?
Sir DONALD CAMERON: Altogether.
Mr. COSTLEY-WHITE: So it includes the whole of the technical services.
Mr. AMERY: I should like to follow up with a further question. There might be two things, Sir Donald. You might have the whole technical staff of the agricultural department paid for out of the pool, or you could have a pool which would provide a certain number of specialists, and those specialists could then be borrowed by the various Governments and taken into the framework of their agricultural or veterinary depart- ments, but on conditions that the individual Government might not be able to offer, and also without any trouble as to what happened to the man when he had done his particular piece of work. There are two possibilities.
Sir DONALD CAMERON: Yes. I took the line of least resistance. You would have to ask for a smaller sum and I think there would be more chance of getting it.
Mr. AMERY: There are two issues, whether the men are to be paid entirely from the central fund, the Colonies contri- buting in the first instance to the central fund. The second issue is whether the fund should exist only to provide the difference in pay. That is one alternative. There is then the other alternative cutting across it, whether the whole of your agricultural, veterinary, and forestry departments are to come within the scope of your scheme, or whether it is in the first instance to provide what you might call a grade Al of higher class specialists who will, while they are in any particular
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