Fawcett went personally into many complaints against petty officials. Unless fully convinced, he was righteously unwilling to dismiss a man, and so often leave him with a stigma for life. Losses of letters having occurred in a local post office, a watch was set, and suspicion fell on a clerk who had been caught using telegrams for racing and betting. As a preliminary measure, the clerk was removed to another office for a month, and the irregularities immediately ceased; he was then sent back, and at once they began again. What could be a clearer case? He must be dismissed at once. ‘Give him another chance,’ said Fawcett. ‘He has admitted his gambling. Had he denied it I should have been convinced he was guilty of thefts.’ Certain tests, usual in the Post Office service, were applied, and the result proved conclusively that the culprit was a guard on the railway, who had been astute enough to forgo taking the letters during the absence of the suspected clerk, and who began again when the man returned. ‘There, you see,’ said Fawcett, ‘by a little extra care I saved a foolish young man from the absolute ruin of character which his dismissal from the Post Office would have caused.’ Again we are reminded of his likeness to that other great, tall, contemporary champion of justice, who, across the Atlantic, had given his life to serve the oppressed and the debased. Lincoln’s critics were always reproaching him for his excessive leniency and clemency; he would never let a shadow fall on the life of an unfortunate if he could help it. He forgot to sign the death warrant for a scared boy who had run away when his officer told him to face his first mad sight of battle; and he meekly granted a widowed mother a pardon for her renegade son. So Fawcett, in his peaceful rôle of directing the Post Office, hated and hesitated to confirm an order for dismissing a subordinate. His critics say that occasionally he pushed clemency to weakness, and that he was ‘unwilling to enforce punishments really called for in the interests of the necessary discipline.’ More than a quarter of a century has passed since this was said, and with the definition of bad (as good out of place) we have come to question the use of so-called punishments. Perhaps Fawcett and Lincoln, in trying not to inflict them, because of their dislike to give pain, were in this respect also far ahead of their time, and, by their intuitive hate of doing an injury to any one, were anticipating the wisest policy of to-day, which seeks by scientific adjustment and inspiration to do away with so crude a thing as punishment. The future will judge of this, but we can appreciate the righteous fear such men had of unjustly interfering with personal rights, or trying to make a stereotyped formula fit an erring human being.