HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.
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both to local manufacturers and to the Customs Authorities has now been arranged. Details of the procedure have been communicated to the Chamber of Commerce.
Next are the comments of my Honourable friend the Senior Chinese Member, and before I deal with them I must thank him for the generous terms in which he has received my maiden venture. I need not remind him that in learning alphabets the skill and patience of the tutor counts for more than the capacity of the pupil.
I again express my sympathy with the speaker and those whom he represents over the impending retirement of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, but I fear I can hold out no hope that he will change. his mind.
As to the training of Marine Surveyors after recruitment, I refer my Honourable friend to the reply already given on page 184 of the Hansard volume for 1931. Whenever it has been possible to find fully trained men willing to transfer to the service of this Colony we have accepted them eagerly but such cases have been few and we have had to accept the cost of training as part of the price of bringing this port up to full Board of Trade requirements.
It is expected that the Juvenile Courts will be in operation very shortly. At first the proclamation putting the Ordinance into effect was held back while certain criticisms made by the Secretary of State were met. Later the delay has been mainly due to the difficulty experienced in securing suitable Probation Officers but this difficulty has now been overcome.
The only other point of detail that falls to me is the matter of the "Omnibus" heads. The objection that Mr. Hallifax and I have raised to the new system is not that it involves extra work but that it does not achieve the object with which it was instituted, namely to give Legislature a more accurate view of the cost of each department. Comparative figures over a series of years will show quite fictitious fluctuations due to the fact that it is only possible to frame the estimates for a given year on the position as it exists in the middle of the previous year. We know from bitter experience that the best laid programmes for coming leave seasons never can work out as planned, but the deviations which unforeseeable casualties will impose are not calculable even by the law of averages. We know that the odds against the figures we set down proving correct in the event are great, but these figures are at least a fixed point and we take that rather than embark on wild guessing. It is true that after the close of a year we can calculate exactly the expenditure for the year in Personal Emoluments in any one Department; but even that is useless for comparative purposes be- cause as I showed in my opening speech, the Department has to bear, if not in that year then in another, the cost of officers on leave
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