The Inter-departmental Committee on Post-Office Establishments consisted of Sir Francis Mowatt, K.C.B., Secretary to the Treasury; Sir Arthur Godley, K.C.B., Secretary to the India Office; Mr. Llewellyn Smith, Secretary to the Board of Trade; and Mr. Spencer Walpole, Secretary to the Post-Office. Thus, with the single exception of Lord Tweedmouth, who presided, the committee was composed of representatives of departmentalism, and who, being high Government officials, could not in human nature be expected to have an impartial sympathy with the claims to be laid before them. It was a committee of permanent secretaries of important Government departments, with whom the principle of economy was the guiding and paramount one. It was manifest from the first moment that there was little generous treatment to be expected from a tribunal so constituted. If anything were wanting to strengthen this supposition, it was the fact that Mr. Arnold Morley, as Postmaster-General, in laying down the terms of reference for the guidance of this committee in its deliberations, expressly made it a condition that they should be guided by the consideration that the “Post-Office is a great Revenue Department, and that, in the words of the Select Committee on Revenue Departments Estimates in 1888, ‘it is more likely to continue to be conducted satisfactorily, if it should also continue to be conducted with a view to profit, as one of the Revenue-yielding departments of the State.’” Thus it was made abundantly clear from the first that sheer justice was not to stand in the way of all-sacred economy. Things had come to such a pass in the Post-Office that the Liberal Postmaster-General was bound to make a show of doing something, especially as the days of his party were now drawing to a close. Liberal Ministers had of late made much of the platitudes which were likely to catch the ephemeral applause of the multitude, and they had been mainly responsible for the doctrine that the State should be the “model employer of labour,” and that the Government should be in the “first flight of employers.” Mr. Arnold Morley had not shirked his share of the responsibility of giving utterance to these mock heroics. If only for the sake of an appearance of consistency, therefore, it was well to have called the Committee of Inquiry into existence. By the time it either failed or succeeded in its object the General Election would be over, and the responsibility for the acceptance of its recommendations, whatever they might be, would come as a legacy to the next Government.