They had men among them who had suffered in the cause of progress, and who were willing to do so again; but they were not yet prepared to go the length of the postal agitators of a past decade, who had openly proclaimed themselves by joining with the London Trades Council. There were some among them who, indeed, had doubts about the legality of Government servants doing so in any case. So far as any such doubt was entertained, it was possibly a survival of that feeling which had caused the telegraphists of 1871 to refuse the offer of a sum of £1000 for the prosecution of Mr. Frank Ives Scudamore for suspending men for forming an association. Again, it had to be remembered that they were claiming to be classed as Lower Division clerks of the Civil Service as embraced by the terms of the Playfair scheme, and, as they conceived it, confirmed by an Order in Council in 1876. The arguments in support of this claim seemed most valid, and they had the authority of eminent counsel in support of their ambitious though, after all, reasonable claim. It was, therefore very natural, perhaps, that while they endorsed and accepted the principle, they should hesitate to weaken their case by avowedly adopting its ritual and its garb. Whether they were fully justified in so thinking is another matter, and it is the fact that has to be recorded. It was not that Norman and those associated with him had not sufficient sympathy with the principle or the necessary courage to proclaim the fact. It was only that they were not as yet certain of their followers, who were made up of men of every shade of opinion, or of the advisability of calling a spade a spade. Yet they were to have their trades union just the same; and from the first moment of its being launched some few months later, in December 1881, the whole organisation was to be run on trades-union lines. But up to the present they had done no more than agree as to the necessity of a permanent society; its actual formation must wait a little longer.