The meeting was accordingly held on December 11, 1889, practically under the smiling patronage of the Postmaster-General, whose action and whose judgment was to afford food for criticism. It was the greatest gathering that had ever assembled within the General Post-Office, far exceeding even the one of ten or eleven years before, which had been called by Booth the postman. The Foreign Branch, which was not used after eight o’clock ordinarily, was on this occasion literally packed almost to suffocation with considerably over two thousand men of all grades. The wildfire of enthusiasm permeated the meeting from the first moment till the last. Men from every district office and from every branch squeezed themselves into the place, and climbed even into the girders of the roof, and the very weight of the enormous mass of humanity almost constituted a grave danger, of which, however, they were not at the time cognisant. Subsequently, when Mr. Raikes went over the building and visited the scene of that memorable meeting, he observed, “What! over two thousand men here! It is a wonder the floor stood the strain.” Overcrowded and enthusiastic as was the meeting, nothing more serious occurred than some damage to a few sorting-tables and the unanimous passing, amidst the wildest excitement, of the all-important resolution. Williams was in the chair, and in his measured, cold, metallic fashion, as a lecturer of the Hunterian Society might, with scalpel in hand, deliver a clinical lecture on nerve tissues and their ramifications, he once more pulled the Fawcett scheme thread from thread. The sorters were by this time pretty well acquainted with the _pros_ and _cons_ of the Fawcett scheme in its application to themselves. The proposition, therefore, that they now petition the Postmaster-General in connection with the unfulfilled conditions of the Fawcett scheme required but little argument to convince them of the desirability of doing so speedily. The second, and perhaps the more important resolution of the two, that they now combine on trades-union lines for purposes of mutual benefit, they were equally agreed on. Both resolutions were carried unanimously, and it was also resolved that the Fawcett Scheme Committee should be forthwith dissolved, and that its members should become the provisional executive of the new organisation, to be called the “London Sorting Clerks’ Association.” The immediate outcome of this great meeting was that a monster petition, embodying the points of former petitions, was signed by the whole of the London sorting force.