To its credit be it said then, that postal agitation has not been altogether confined to capturing the enemies’ cattle, or to striving for yet a bigger share of the loaves and fishes. It has only had to discover its duties and responsibilities to immediately lay claim to them, and to strenuously assert its right to fulfil them. It has always maintained the principle of combination as a principle, while it has long and persistently protested against the exclusion of postal servants from the full enjoyment of civil rights and the untrammelled exercise of the franchise. It has lost few opportunities of championing the cause of the weak against departmental intolerance, and silently and unseen it has often stayed the hand of official persecution at the very moment it was raised to strike. It has triumphed ultimately where often it has seemed to have failed. It has fought for and won the one right accorded to every free-born British citizen who was not a postal official—the right of free speech and open public meeting. When, as an unpretentious little organisation, numerically weak and modest in its programme, it was first started by a few London postmen and letter-sorters, it was doubtless prompted principally by the very human desire to improve their own workaday lives and to benefit their wives and children. It need not be claimed that they were animated by any higher or nobler motive. But as time went on, “new occasions taught new duties,” and as the sphere of their operations almost insensibly widened, so they readily accepted the responsibilities attaching to their character as the wing of a forward movement. CHAPTER II BEGINNINGS OF COMBINED AGITATION—THE COMPULSORY SUNDAY LABOUR QUESTION—FIRST PUBLIC PROTEST AT EXETER HALL.