The Governors were expected to send to the Colonial Office quarterly, or if that were impossible, yearly accounts of the expenditure under the last head.[1] By this means any financial excesses or improper payments might be checked, for the Treasury, when the bills were presented for payment, appealed first for the advice of the Colonial Office. This was one of the reasons why the irregularities of communication were considered so regrettable.[2] The Secretary of State in a despatch of 1812 dealt with the whole financial position very severely. "Although," he wrote, "bills have been presented for payment dated the 11th March, 1811, I have received from you no information in regard to any payments which have been made in the Colony subsequently to 30th September, 1810. … From that period … notwithstanding the accounts you then transmitted of the flourishing state of the Colony, the expenditure has continued to increase.
"In giving my opinion to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury that the bills which had been presented for payment should be accepted, I have been governed solely by a consideration of the hardship which individuals would sustain and the additional expense to which Government might be eventually liable had they been protested."[3]
No Secretary of State was likely to go further than this. Rebuke and reproach, and as a last resort perhaps recall, were the only weapons of financial control so long as the Governor was honest and the calls on the Treasury not absurdly extravagant. "It is impossible," wrote the Minister in the despatch just quoted, "for me to point out what expenses have been unnecessarily incurred, or in the execution of what services retrenchments might have been made." He could only enjoin rigid economy in general terms, and urge that in undertaking public work "your first object should be to make the colonial revenue applicable to that part of the expenditure of the Colony which now falls so heavily upon the Treasury of this country".[4] Nor were such works to be commenced "without
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