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approximately $17,000 in 1936, $20,000 in 1937 and
$15,000 in 1938.
3. The more important difficulty is that there
are also charged to this account expenses in connection
with work done for Chinese Railway Administrations. These
are in the first place liable to be much larger in amount,
the total involved in 1938 being over $78,000, and in
the second place are practically impossible to estimate.
Exceptional conditions such as those of last year may
lead to the Chinese Administrations requiring much work
to be done in Hong Kong, and it is hoped that when normal
conditions are again restored a steady stream of orders
will be received from the Canton-Hankow line. A
subsidiary consideration is that it may not always be
desirable to give publicity to such orders, and it would,
therefore, seem desirable to avoid possibly having to
take supplementary votes to authorise expenditure on
them.
4. The main difficulty, however, is the
impossibility of estimating with any accuracy requirements
which are dependent on the changing circumstances and demands of foreign railway administrations which are not
even themselves under unified control. I would suggest
that the procedure proposed here does not conflict at all
with the basic object of the new accounting instructions,
that is to give the Legislature full control over the
expenditure of Government money, since in the case of work done on behalf of other Government Departments the
cost will have been voted elsewhere and in the case of
Chinese administration work the cost is practically