ouse, and
accordingly the votes of credit for 1914-1915 were for the amounts
required beyond the ordinary grants of Parliament for the cost of
military and naval operations. When we came to frame the estimates for
the ensuing year, 1915-1916, the Treasury was confronted with the
difficulty, which amounted to an impossibility, of presenting to
Parliament estimates in the customary form for navy and army
expenditure, apart from the cost of the war. All the material
circumstances have been set out in the Treasury minute of Feb. 5, and in
principle have been approved by the House. As the committee will
remember, the total of the estimates which we have presented for the
army and the navy amount to only L15,000 for the army and L17,000 for
the navy, and the remainder of the cost of both these services will be
provided for out of votes of credit, and the vote of credit now being
proposed provides for general army and navy service in as far as
specific provision is not made for them in the small estimates already
presented. This vote of credit, therefore, has two features which I
believe are quite unique, and without precedent. In the first place, it
is the largest single vote on record in the annals of this House, and,
secondly, as I have said, it provides for the ordinary as well as for
the emergency expenditure of the army and the navy. The House may ask on
what principle or basis has this sum of L250,000,000 been arrived at. Of
course it is difficult, and indeed impossible, to give any exact
estimate, but as regards the period, so far as we can forecast it, for
which this vote is being taken, it has been thought advisable to take a
sum sufficient, so far as we can judge, to provide for all the
expenditure which will come in course of payment up to approximately the
second week in July--that is to say, a little over three months, or
something like 100 days of war expenditure.

As regards the daily rate of expenditure--I have dealt hitherto with the
expenditure up to March 31--the War Office calculates that from the
beginning of April, 1915, the total expenditure on army services will be
at the rate of L1,500,000 per day, with a tendency to increase. The
total expenditure on the navy at the commencement of April will, it is
calculated, amount to about L400,000 per day. The aggregate expenditure
on the army and the navy services at the beginning of 1915-1916 is
therefore L1,900,000 per day, with a tendency to increase, and fo