They were to insist on more humane treatment as servants of the State, and all those better conditions of hours and work which even the Tweedmouth scheme had left them unprovided with. A better minimum wage for the juniors, the question of deferred pay and pensions, promotion, favouritism, harsh medical restrictions, and numerous other matters were to be included in the programme which should facilitate their hopeful journeyings in search of the postal land of promise and a contented service flowing with milk and honey. The general adoption of this programme by the combined associations at the first Congress, held at Derby, September 1899, marked an epoch in postal history. It was a fitting celebration of the jubilee of postal agitation. Now, with the purpose of achieving these ideals by the way, they steadfastly set their faces towards the time-point when the State should in very truth become the model employer and the great exemplar to the labour market of the world. * * * * * Such concisely supplies, so far as it has gone, the history of a remarkable agitation. Whatever its lesson, and whatever the ultimate verdict upon it from a strictly impartial standpoint, postal agitation is a fact that bears recording in the general history of organised labour. Whether it may be deemed wholly justified or not, it has its value as an episode. Agitation in the Post-Office may not always have been studiously correct in attitude and demeanour, but perhaps it has committed no more and no greater mistakes than have the officials in their dealings with it in the past. It might almost be said that it represents, if only in miniature, the people’s fight for freedom and the gradual extension of popular liberty; for the Post-Office has seen its pre-Chartist days, when to dare openly organise discontent would have been to make men amenable to the Law of Conspiracy. It has represented a continuous conflict between the spirit of exaction on one side, and the natural desire for betterment in pay and conditions, in just accordance with the improving value of labour everywhere, on the other. It has, indeed, been but a reflection and an analogue of the earlier struggles between capital and labour outside, and generally a protest against that fixed and fossilised scale of pay and that Procrustean standard of conditions for all time which have been shown to be no more possible here than in the broader arena of the labour market. Right or wrong, but always sustained by the conviction of right nevertheless, with the self-same tenacity with which their efforts have been repelled, the men who have from time to time engaged in this movement have persisted till they have beaten down the barriers, and gained some proportion of those advantages they laid claim to as their just dues.