I think one of the great difficulties in the way of the proper co-ordination of the technical services in the Colonies is that our organisation in the Colonial Office has not grown concurrently with the development of those various services in the Colonies themselves. The organisation to-day in the Colonial Office is very much the same as it was in the clays of Joseph Chamberlain. The time has come when there should be some form of reorganisation. The Colonial Office is divided into territorial departments, the officers in charge of the various departments being responsible either for separate Colonies or groups of Crown Colonies, but those officers, excellent men as they are, and skilled as they are in dealing with political administration, are also called upon to deal with every sort of technical subject. Questions are referred to them for decision by the Colonies about railways and road development, public works, posts and telegraphs, education, medical services, and so forth. No man can possibly give really intelligent advice on those subjects unless he has had the advantage of referring to experts, especially when, as I understand is normally the case, he has not had the opportunity of visiting the countries themselves.

Therefore, I suggest that there should be technical departments in the Colonial Office, manned by experts, corresponding to the various services that there are in the Crown Colonies themselves. Then, when questions dealing with any particular service came to any territorial officer, he would be able to refer to the expert and get a reasonable opinion. The expert, from his position, would have a general knowledge of the problems affecting his particular service in every one of the Colonies, and thereby each colony would be able to benefit by the experience of all. At present, all the various technical services are run in water-tight compartments, and no colony or group of colonies is able to benefit from the experience of others. Nobody would think of starting an army in the field without giving the commander-in-chief experts in the various branches of the service under his command to act as his advisers. Nobody would think of starting to run railways, or hospitals, or roads, or telephones, or telegraphs without giving the general administrator in charge of them technical experts. That is what I suggest should be done in the Colonial Office. Otherwise, I feel that we "shall blunder, like we have blundered before, by putting railways in the wrong places, starting a railway sytem that has no beginning and no end, and so on.

We have made a start, I know, on these lines, and the Colonial Office have recently appointed a Director of Medical Services at a salary of £1,500 a year, but that is only a start, and we must not stop there. I should like to give one example of what a tropical medical service really is. The United Fruit Company, which controls a territory in tropical Central America about three-quarters the size of the Gambia, and with a population of about three-quarters of that of Gambia, has, at its headquarters in New York, a medical organisation which costs £16,000 a year. They have installed that organisation to look after a territory and a population smaller than those of our smallest Crown Colony, and we cannot say that we have gone very far if the Colonial Office have been empowered to spend £1,500 a year to look after the sanitary and medical welfare of nearly 50,000,000 people. It is not extravagant, in any case. I believe now they have also started a Director of Education, but do not let us stop there.

We are only beginning to feel our way, but let us not be charged with not really developing these countries, for which we are trustees, both for the benefit of the natives and for the benefit of this country, because I am sure that in a, very short time we have to look more and more towards our Crown Colonies and Dominions to find places, not only in which to sell our goods, but from which to get our raw materials. If you take our cotton trade, for instance, unless we have got countries of our own to produce material for our Lancashire mills, we may be badly off at no very distant date. It is in our own Empire that we shall find the solution of our troubles, and I, therefore, suggest, first of all, that there should be two Secretaries of State appointed, one for the Dominions and one for the Crown Colonies. I hope, of course, the present Secretary of State will understand that there is no reflection on him intended. What I mean is that it is too big a job to put on to any one man. Furthermore, there should be a Committee appointed to report if and how it is desirable to reorganise the Colonial Office so that we can develop the Crown Colonies to the best advantage of the inhabitants of those countries and of the workpeople of this country.