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administrative difficulties in connection with the kind of specialist and making contracts with him and having to secure his future and so on, and on the other hand, from the point of view of the man, he would be offered a very fine career with none of the present anxieties connected with transfer. The service being established, the ordinary ambitious man in the Colony would want to do some specialist work and get on that general list, and thus the general list may gradually extend over the scientific branches and become a larger one than in the first instance. I am inclined to think there is an easier line of approach than the one Sir Donald Cameron suggested.
Sir DONALD CAMERON: My suggestion included the whole of the agricultural staff in the scheme to meet the point of the small Colonies where a man stagnates, which we shall not meet if we leave them out of the scheme. I think the difficulties in regard to the language and the various other local matters in connection with agricultural officers have been over- emphasised. My conception is that, if you had an Imperial Agricultural Department, of Research or otherwise, you would appoint a man in the first case to that department and then send him out to Tanganyika as you do now. He would remain there through his ordinary course, I suppose taking ten or twelve years to get out of the junior grades where he is learning the language, and his conditions of service for the first twelve years would be the same as now. I appreciate the point in regard to the Africans, but that happens now in West Africa in regard to the medical service. There is a kind of supernumerary medical service of Africans attached to the medical staff and, unless it is the intention to admit Africans to the ordinary medical staff, the same arrangement could be made with the agricultural officers. I heartily welcome half the scheme even if we cannot have the whole.
Mr. AMERY: It is quite true the research proposal does not cover the case of the executive officer in the small Colony who stagnates. I wonder whether that case might be met by some system of larger groups; whether apart from the central research staff it might not be possible to get Colonies of similar conditions, East Africa on the one side, and West Africa, which do it to some extent with the medical service, whether that could be extended so as to include small Colonies like the Seychelles in some one group in which their technical staffs could get a certain amount of transfer and promotion.
Sir DONALD CAMERON: I daresay the Seychelles could be linked with the East African Colonies.
Sir JOSEPH BYRNE: I think a man might like to go over there for a certain time. I believe a man would go over to the Seychelles if he knew he were not to be kept there for long periods as he is at present,
Mr. ORMSBY GORE:*One point in Sir Donald Cameron's reply I would like to emphasise. I understand that, in our new agricultural scholarship scheme, which concerns men from various agricultural colleges and Universities in this country who have a scientific degree, they do a common year at Oxford on agricul- ture, economics, and things of that kind, and then they go to Trinidad and again do a common course for a year in the specific problems which tropical agriculture present, taking a wide view of tropical agriculture. Before being posted to the Colony where their career is going to be, which is done towards the conclusion of their year at Trinidad, they are divided. I understand, right away from the start into officers who are suit- able for what I call laboratory work, for essentially scientific work, and those who are suitable as general administrative agri- cultural officers, for this reason, I understand that where you get your young man who really has got the chance of getting new knowledge you want to get him continuously on to the work of getting new knowledge from the start. A certain number of those who are going to Trinidad this year when passing out of Trinidad will be agricultural chemists or plant geneticists
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or possibly one or two may be bio-chemists, who will be special- ists throughout their lives. You may destory their value, their supreme scientific value, by making them all go through a period as ordinary agricultural officers. Similarly, the number of officers who are of the general administrative scientific type in agriculture who should be encouraged to specialise will want very careful watching. The two careers are very different and the numbers who will qualify under Sir Donald Cameron's scheme which he has thrown out this afternoon and pass from the ordinary agricultural staff to the purely scientific staff would probably be small.
Mr. OLIPHANT: One point I should like to make is that a specialist research officer would not as a rule make a good administrative officer of high rank. He is generally a bit of a crank. Research is very important, but no less important is the application of research, and for that the field staff wants considering, too. We do not want to lose sight of the field staff. The chief need of the administrative service is some chance of promotion after a time, and for the higher posts languages are not so necessary. When a man gets into a higher post he can get people to translate for him, which he cannot do while he is in a junior grade. We want transferability in the higher grades. Mr. AMERY: While agreeing that the pure research man is only occasionally a good administrator it is also very valuable for the administrator before he goes to his job to have had contact with research. Would it not be possible that our fund should not only provide for the research staff but should enable, with a fund for maintenance, administrative officers after a cer- tain number of years to take up something rather more ambitious than study leave, enable the agricultural officer to do a whole year at Trinidad, for instance, as a break after seven or eight years of administrative work in a Colony? If you did that it would be much easier to arrange for a man who had served in Nigeria for eight years then to have a year at Trinidad. When you once got him away from his Colony regard him as available for transfer to somewhere else. Possibly some arrangement for special study, with greater opportunities of transfer at the break created by the special study, might meet a good deal of your point.
Mr. OLIPHANT: I think, Sir, as long as he has the oppor- tunity of getting away it does not matter how he gets away. No man wants to commit himself to serve for the whole of his working life in one individual Colony.
Sir GORDON GUGGISBERG: The curse of most of the Crown Colonies is that we have glorified farmers as administra- tors, and not trained scientists.
Mr. AMERY: That is why I attach so much importance to the man at the top of a big service, if he has not been for some time a specialist man, having at least had some contact with research at an institution. He will have some sympathy with the scientific man and know what it is all about.
In one
Sir HERBERT STANLEY: It cuts both ways. Colony, I refer to Southern Rhodesia, the trained scientist at the head of the Agriculture Department frequently had difficul- ties with the trained scientists under him. Being an expert he was inclined to criticise their views. Upon his retirement he was replaced by an ordinary administrative officer without any specialist training whatever, and it was left for the specialists to approach the Minister direct.
Mr. AMERY: That rather illustrates the point. Is not the best head of a department the administrative man who has not got the crankiness of the pure specialist, but who has been enough in touch with specialists to know how the animal has to be treated and with a sympathy for the working of his mind?
Sir HERBERT STANLEY: I think that is the best plan if you can find the right man.
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