A correspondent has called our attention to two errors in
the ac- -count of the Colonial Expenditure for Ceylon. The Governor's salary, he states was reduced from 10,000/. to 8,000/. a year on the appointment of Sir WILMOT HORTON ; and. Sir HUDSON LOWE has been superseded by Sir JOHN WILSON. These errors (and there are doubtless several others of a similar kind) have arisen from our being. compelled to take returns for our data, which were printed (as we explained in the introduction) in 1828 and 1829. Several Sessional Papers upon the expense of particular Colonies have been published since those years, but no entire view of the subject. Where changes of the kind pointed out by our corre- spondent have taken place, the last account is of course the most to be relied on; in all other respects they fall very far below the series of Returns for 1828. We may add once for all, that the difficulties which beset an inquiry into the Colonial Expenditure have an additional element of incorrectness, from which the other branches of the subject are free, and that is, the distance. If a return be required of the expense of a department at home, it can be -procured in a month. In the case of the Colonies, it must either be prepared from some existing document in the Colonial Office, oran order must be sent out to the Colony, and returned from thence, with the certainty of some delay in the transmission both ways. During the time which elapses, some change probably takes place, which renders the account incorrect in its details. Under the best system, Colonial information must always be for a corn- Paratively bygone period. The accounts will perhaps always be from a year to eighteen months in arrears.
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