The uncompromising attitude taken up by the Postmaster-General caused the sorters to strike out a new line of policy from that moment. Clery had become impatient of the slow and unsatisfactory methods of pressing their claims on the attention of the department. The methods had availed them well with Mr. Raikes, but in Sir James Fergusson they soon had to recognise a master of a different calibre. It was not only the slowness of the hackneyed method of seeking redress with almost the certainty of refusal that decided them on their course of action. There were other things in addition. The general attitude of the officials towards them and their organisation had undergone a marked change almost from the moment that Sir James Fergusson set foot in St. Martin’s-le-Grand. One of the first acts was to prohibit the distribution of the _Post_, their official organ, within Post-Office buildings, and there was a growing and well-grounded suspicion that it was the first expression of a desire to smash the union of postal employés. There were indeed a hundred different influences in evidence everywhere about them which decided the most impulsive of their members to urge the immediate adoption of a vigorous Parliamentary policy and to press for a Committee of Inquiry into the Post-Office. If such a policy was not novel, it was a bold one. Clery himself, three or four years before, had advocated such a policy, and it was only owing to the conciliatory treatment meted out to them by Mr. Raikes that its further consideration was so long shelved. There were serious differences of opinion between the chairman of the association, J. H. Williams, and a section of the committee in regard to this question. Williams’s colder, more cautious nature put him in opposition to the more daring line of policy in which he discerned strong possibilities of personal risk to those adopting it. No man could suspect Williams of want of nerve; he had proved his high courage sufficiently; it was only that he thought the old and more familiar methods the safer, and probably the surer. Clery, the more impetuous, eventually gained over by far the greater following to his own way of thinking, and in the result the question was definitely settled at a general meeting, June 15, 1892. At this meeting it was resolved “that immediate action be taken to secure from Parliamentary candidates a pledge to support a motion for a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry.” This was carried with enthusiasm, and practically unanimously.