The long-standing hostility of one of the higher officials towards the principle of combination again manifested itself in an unexpected manner not long afterwards. In the following month of December some severe animadversions on postal servants and postal combination from Mr. Lewin Hill, the lately-retired Assistant Secretary, reported in the _Daily Graphic_, provoked strong resentment generally, which, however, gradually subsided in amusement on the attacks becoming several times repeated, and as often replied to in other organs of the press. In the prosecution of Parliamentary policy the postal movement had gained strong reinforcements, both in the service and in the House of Commons. Members of Parliament had come and gone, but the number of their advocates had not fallen away. Among the new adherents to their cause was Mr. W. C. Steadman, M.P., whose return for Stepney had been secured by the turning balance of the postal vote there. Among all the members of the House who had beaten their brains against the granite walls of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Mr. Steadman from the first moment of his election proved the most persistent and the most pushful in his advocacy of postal claims. On the opening of the February session, 1899, he moved an amendment to the Address, and once more recapitulated the sins of omission and commission for which the Tweedmouth Inquiry was responsible, and strenuously urged for a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry to complete the work left undone, being ably supported by other friends of the postal cause. Mr. Hanbury, as representing the Postmaster-General, resisted further inquiry by the adoption of the official arguments which had served their purpose so well on former occasions. As strengthening his argument, the Postmaster-General’s representative took the opportunity of importing into the discussion a personal attack on W. E. Clery, who had, since his dismissal for furthering the right of combination, become notorious as the arch agitator of the postal movement. Mr. Hanbury made the damaging assertion that “the battle rages round Mr. Clery, the man who is responsible for the agitation.” Yet very illogically, as it seems, he tried to prove that the agitator round whom this battle was raging had not the confidence of trades unionists, inasmuch, as he averred, he was refused admission to the Trades Union Congress, “because he was neither a working member of the trade he represented nor a paid permanent official.” It was an absurd misstatement, as the chairman of the Sorters’ Association had never been refused admission at any Trades Union Congress, but had represented his society there for several successive years. If he was not literally and actually a working member of the craft he represented, he was so in the meaning of the Congress rules, and in any case it was a weak and unworthy argument. In conclusion, the Postmaster-General’s advocate, in paying