97 851 with and harassing the villages on our side, while in Mongalla a succession of elephant-hunting parties are a constant menace. On one occasion a small party even penetrated to the west bank of the Nile. The difficulty of dealing with these people by military action is very great.

An important step was taken last winter when His Majesty's Government sent a mission under Majors Barley and Athill to Maji to enquire into the responsibility for these raids, and the information which they obtained has been of great value in assisting our representations to the Abyssinian Government.

Ultimately, however, the only sound method of preserving order on the frontier is to have a close administration established in even the remotest districts. But for a variety of reasons, which need not be detailed at length here, progress is bound to be slow in this respect. Little by little our control is extending itself eastwards from the Nile in the southern Soudan, but for the present, unless the Abyssinian Government can exercise a more active control over their frontier chiefs, we cannot expect an entirely satisfactory state of affairs.

III.—FINANCE AND ECONOMICS.

1. General.

The Financial Secretary (Colonel Sir E. E. Bernard, K.B.E., C.M.Gj.) in his note on the financial situation, has taken 1913 as the most convenient year with which to begin his account of the financial development of the Soudan during the war, because apart from the special conditions of that period, in-that year the Egyptian Government ceased to make any subvention to the Soudan in add of its civil expenditure, and the Soudan Government has since had to rely on its unaided resources to make both ends meet.

The amount of this subvention, which started at £E. 156,000 in 1899 and rose to £E. 268,000 in 1902, had gradually been reduced until it stood at £E. 163,000 in 1912. In 1913 a new settlement of the financial relations between Egypt and the Soudan was arrived at. It was decided, on the one hand, to discontinue the contribution paid by the Egyptian Government to the Soudan, and on the other to credit the Soudan with the Customs dues collected in Egypt on goods coming to and going from the Soudan which had .previously been collected and retained by Egypt.

The effect of this settlement was that the contribution by Egypt for civil and ■military expenditure which in 1912 stood at £E. 335,000, of which *£E. 163,000 was on account of civil expenditure and £E. 172,000 on account of the army, disappeared from the Revenuie side of the Budget, while the Customs receipts were increased by £E. 85,000, this being the figure then estimated as the equivalent of the duties collected in Egypt. At the same time the sum of £E.172,000 paid to the Egyptian Government for the maintenance of the army in the Soudan was removed from the expenditure side of the Budget, since it was recognised that the method of accounting, by which the sum of £E. 172,000 appeared on both sides of the Budget in order to bring out the fact that a part of the Egyptian military expenditure was properly chargeable to the Soudan, was complicated and liable to misapprehension.

The suspension of the Egyptian contribution could not have taken place at a more inopportune time. 1913 was the. second year in succession in which the Soudan had suffered from low floods and poor rains. Business suffered from'the general depression and from the feeling of unrest brought about by the war in the Balkans, and the value of exports fell from £E. 1,373,000 in 1912 to £E. 1,185,000 in 1913.

The year 1914 was worse. In fact from' the point of view of revenue and of the •economic situation, it was perhaps the most difficult year experienced in the history of the Soudan. The Nile flood of the previous year had been one of the worst on record, and the rains, which had completely failed in several districts, were scanty in almost all the provinces. In August of that year the war in Europe broke out, and trade, which had been suffering from the effects of the prolonged agricultural depression, received a further set back. The year 1915 was generally not much better, though the country was well stocked with food and agricultural produce consequent upon the abundant rains of tlie previous autumn and a high Nile flood. Owing to war conditions and the scarcity of shipping, there was at first little demand for produce for export, and the cultivators, who form the bulk of the [3437 y—2] 0 House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online. Copyright (c) 2006 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.