Soon after Mr. Raikes became Postmaster-General, as has already been described, a crusade of agitation beset him from all quarters, growing fiercer every day. But the Postal Clerks’ Association was not formed for purposes of agitation as agitation; and it contented itself with remaining as an interested and perhaps a sympathetic spectator. The great wave of industrial agitation following in the wake of improvement in trade everywhere at the beginning of 1890, aroused the telegraphists, the postmen, and the Metropolitan letter-sorters to further exertion in their various ways. And when Mr. Raikes reintroduced the old regulation of 1866, limiting the freedom of public meeting, the postal clerks were not behind in lodging their indignant protest, in common with most other combined bodies. They emphasised the indignation they shared in holding a mass meeting at Liverpool, their head centre. Their good manners had so far not been corrupted by evil communication; but adversity makes strange bedfellows. There were partial jealousies between the sorting clerks and the telegraphists, and both to an extent felt themselves superior to postmen; but in this they were as one. The Cardiff case gave them no good opinion of Mr. Raikes; while their minor difference with the telegraphists was forgotten in their sympathy with them. And, added to this, about this time they were given an axe of their own to grind, and the telegraphists in turn looked on with a sympathetic eye. At the Liverpool Conference of Postal Clerks, held April 1890, the shadow of the official reporter obtruded itself across their threshold. He was introduced to the chairman of the meeting by an official letter, which contained what was tantamount to a demand in the name of the Postmaster-General. The official reporter had to be admitted to take notes, or they had to disband the conference. They were as helpless as was the official reporter himself, who was also a paid servant of the department. The chairman of the meeting, in his opening statement, referred to the fact that for the first time in their history a meeting of officials called for a praiseworthy object were compelled to receive in their midst an unwelcome intruder sent in the name of discipline. Though there was nothing in the constitution of their society that was antagonistic to departmental authority, they had to accept this humiliating and Russianising condition, or forfeit altogether their right of free speech as Englishmen and Britons. This new restrictive rule became particularly hard of digestion to the postal clerks, who had hitherto prided themselves on the absolutely-constitutional lines on which their organisation was run. The introduction of avowed trades unionism could no longer be regarded as a crime in the Post-Office, since Sir Arthur Blackwood, the Permanent Secretary, himself some little time before had publicly stated that there was a growing spirit of