studied and little understood, even so far as they had taken root in the minds of the working-classes. Combination in any shape or form was in fact little sympathised with by those whom it sought to benefit, and in Government offices particularly would have been anathema to the authorities, or, at any rate, received with fear and aversion. While the good old principle of “looking after Doub” prevailed extensively in every other Government office, it was almost paramount in the Post-Office; and this being so, it would be surprising to find anything but a state of stagnant contentment existing among the working staff. If not exactly a state of stagnant contentment, the readiness to assert a principle, and to resent encroachment on existing rights and privileges, would certainly not be forcibly in evidence. Whatever official wrongs, if any, they may have been subjected to at the hands of their superiors, they showed no willingness to be awakened to a sense of them. The tide of Chartism beat in vain against the grim walls of the Post-Office; the fluctuations of trade disputes, strikes, and lock-outs interested them only in a casual way, if at all; while the bare idea of organised opposition to the wishes of the authorities, however arbitrary, would have spelt downright treason. They were recruited from a class of men who, if they had not always been brought up in the paths of virtue, had always gone along the line of least resistance, which was that of conventional respectability. Once in the Post-Office, they had a character to keep up, and they were not as other men who had to work for their living with dirty hands. They felt that their Queen and country had reposed a confidence in them by selecting them for the responsible position they held. They were something midway between lawyers’ clerks and menials of the royal household. They doubtless felt they were very superior persons, though their wages were meagre and their uniform scanty; but the authorities were like unto little gods to them, and so they took it for granted that Heaven had established a natural gulf between them. Still they were the children of patronage, and of fathers whose only ambition was to see their sons settled in a Government situation; for a Government situation was for their sons the Mecca and the goal of those people who always kept good and paid proper respects to the parson and their rent regularly to the squire. And when the sons got there they felt they were a chosen few, invested with a caste and a distinction which entitled them to hold their heads a little higher than the people living in the same street. The consciousness that his neighbours occasionally pointed him out as the “gentleman who works in the Post-Office” more than atoned for his inability to wear fashionable clothes and a top-hat like his superiors.