were gone, and he had to face the world afresh and take his stand in the battle of life against those with every advantage over him. And dismissal was particularly easy in the earlier times, when a suspicious and malignant officialdom could construe the smallest sign of disaffection into insubordination. Thus it will be seen it was no child’s play to engage in agitation twenty or thirty years ago, and the men who did so evidently did not enter into it for the love of the game altogether. There must have been something very rotten in the State of Denmark when men were goaded into what was to them desperate methods, and with so many odds against them, just for the sake of improving the conditions of their servitude. It shows that they must have felt their grievances keenly; it shows that in some degree at least that spirit of resistance to wrong and injustice to which we owe so much animated and sustained them throughout. In those days postal agitators stood almost alone, receiving very little sympathy from the press or the public, and equally as little assistance from the various trades unions, simply because postal grievances, which have always been difficult of understanding, were much more so then, and because it was difficult then to make people believe that men in permanent Government employment could have grievances of any kind. That the trades unionists of the country were slow to rally to their assistance or to proffer them practical sympathy is better now understood and made allowance for, for postmen and letter-sorters were not readily recognised as a separate craft by the various unions of ordinary artisans; they could claim no trade kinship with them; they were neither this nor that, but a sort of ugly duckling in the legitimate brood of artisanship.