London, June 14.
In the House of Commons to-day, Mr. Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in in-traducing a supplementary _estimate of £27,197,000 for the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office, said the conference he held at Cairo with experts from Mesopotamia and Palestine had decided in favour of an immediate reduction of the number of troops in Mesopotamia from a 33 battalion to a 23 battalion scale, with a prospective reduction after October to a 12 battalion scale. This resulted in a saving of £4,879,000 in the Army Lstimates. The Government's total expenses in both countries for the present year were £27,500,000. If the arrangements the Government were now making were successful, he anticipated that expenses for next year would not exceed £9,000,000 or £10,000,000.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.