With the rank and file of the postal service composed of such men, brought in under such conditions, it is not surprising that discontent never raised its head, and that many a grievance went unredressed because it was silently endured. Nor is it surprising that the Post-Office, garrisoned by such an army sworn in in this manner, was almost the last citadel that it attacked with any degree of success. It would have been too dangerous for any man to have attempted to bell the cat in those days, and however strong may have been the desire in some, without the support and confidence of their fellows it would have been sheer official suicide to have taken the first step. They were men calculated to endure much. Petty official tyranny to such men meant no more than mild discipline. A grievance with them was but an evanescent thing, felt to-day, forgotten to-morrow; for they had a stake in the Post-Office. To express discontent would be to court certain dismissal, and that would have meant much to them, while it would mean the betrayal of the good, kind patron, their father’s master or landlord, whose powerful influence had placed them there. Indeed, it is easy to understand that no man would have felt himself either a spy or a renegade to principle in secretly or openly denouncing the rash fool who would endeavour to organise a meeting of protest against his superiors. Such were the conditions and such the temper of the men of the postal staff that must have long obtained prior to the fifties and sixties. From the introduction of the penny post in 1840, which practically organised the Post-Office on a new basis, there is no evidence of combined discontent worth recording till the early fifties, though through that period of eighteen years or so the leaven of discontent was slowly but surely working, till a desire to make their wants known at last became manifest. Yet only a few years after the institution of the penny post the indoor working staffs and the letter-carriers were both given grave cause for dissatisfaction by the extension of Sunday labour. Whatever protest they may have made of their own accord counted for little; but it is interesting to find that so early as 1848 an influential and public-spirited section of the community took up the matter of compulsory Sunday labour on behalf of the aggrieved postal servants, the sorting-clerks and others, and publicly expressed that dissatisfaction which Government servants dared not themselves utter too openly.