During the interval, when the ball was kept rolling in this manner, Mr. Gladstone had amply fulfilled his promise to give the subject his best attention, as sufficiently appears from a letter which, belonging now to the history of Post Office Savings Banks, we append below.[164] Expressions of opinion on the advantage of some such scheme still continued to be sent to Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sikes, which must have encouraged them both to persevere, and which made it very apparent that the public had made up its mind not to allow the matter to drop--at any rate, quietly. The most important petitions sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer emanated from Liverpool, Leeds, and York; but a resolution passed by the Dublin Statistical Society, presided over by Dr. Whately, the late Archbishop of Dublin, and signed by Dr. W. Neilson Hancock as secretary, deserves special notice, were it only for the weight attaching to Dr. Hancock's own name.[165] In answer to these and similar memorials, Mr. Gladstone seems to have generally replied that the matter was under his most careful consideration; "that he received with cordial satisfaction this expression of opinion, proceeding from persons well qualified to judge, and that he earnestly hoped it may be practicable to frame a plan by which the objects in view may be extensively attained." And now the curtain may be said to have fallen upon the scheme, and for fully twelve months it is beyond the public gaze, and entirely beyond public criticism. We find that now and then Mr. Sikes was busy during the period in answering objections to his plan, with as much energy and good sense as he had previously displayed in his advocacy of it, before he had the good fortune to enlist the services of Mr. Gladstone in its behalf. Now, however, it may be said to have passed out of his hands, and to have fallen into those of others, who, no way averse or unfriendly to his project, saw that it would be necessary largely to remodel it, in order to make it fit into the machinery, (of the working of which Mr. Sikes was necessarily ignorant,) upon which it would have to be engrafted. Furthermore, among much approving criticism of the scheme, there had been not a little feeling exhibited among influential organs of the public press, that Mr. Sikes had not gone far enough in his proposals, and that on some points the details were not nearly so liberal as they ought to be made. As an ardent friend to the Savings Bank system, Mr. Sikes had doubtless well considered the objections which Savings Bank managers were likely to urge; and, to stave off opposition on the part of many of his friends, had apparently sacrificed a detail here and there in a matter where boldness of action was most essential to success. If one thing is more clear than another in the history of our great reforms, it is that the projector who plunged right into the stream was always surer of ultimate success than he who paddled about in the shallows, or kept as