It could not have been want of evidence that stood in the way of the Postmaster-General’s conviction that the postal dominion over which he reigned was suffering from the effects of maladministration. Mr. Arnold Morley may not have been responsible for it, and he might have remedied it to some extent if only he had the power; but throughout he weakly pretended that there was nothing to convince him, that there was really nothing wrong with the service beyond the imaginary evils produced by chronic discontent fomented by self-advertising agitators. Yet from top to bottom the whole postal service was honeycombed with discontent, and moth-eaten with the most squalid grievances. It was not only the letter-sorters, the telegraphists, the postal clerks, and the still more familiar postmen, who were now engaged in this battle for the betterment of the service. These had now been reinforced by the postmasters and sub-postmasters; and the _crême de la crême_ of the service were united with the despised and outcast mail-cart drivers in a demand for better pay, better hours, and better conditions generally. In the face of this, Mr. Arnold Morley chose to put his fingers in his ears and forcibly shut his eyes. The Postmaster-General appeared to think that by affirming and reaffirming the right of combination among postal employés, there his moral responsibility ended. It was gratifying to postal servants throughout the kingdom to learn that on April 2, 1895, Mr. Arnold Morley, in correspondence with Mr. Murray Macdonald, had once again reaffirmed this right to combine. It so far pinned the department down, and was a contract it could not decently depart from in future; but where was the real value of this right, when the real and painful grievances from which they complained were to remain ignored? But Mr. Arnold Morley was not the first Postmaster-General who had played the part of Mrs. Partington with her broom. The inevitable was to happen in this case as in similar others; and at last the growth of discontent, backed by the sympathy of the press and the public, was to bear down the barriers of departmental opposition; and the Postmaster-General was forced to capitulate. The matter was brought to this climax on May 17, 1895, when Mr. Hudson Kearley, M.P., moved for a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry. Mr. Arnold Morley, as the department personified, naturally resisted with a brave show of strength, and then pretending to melt into a magnanimous mood, agreed to, as a compromise, a Departmental Committee of Inquiry. The pretence of magnanimity, however, was in serious reality intended as a practical piece of cynicism, characteristic of its author, and introduced solely as a means of contributing to the undoing of the enemy. If the malcontents of the service would have edged tools to play with, Mr. Arnold Morley was not to be blamed if they badly cut themselves. And so it came about that the Inter-departmental Committee of Inquiry,