A year or so later, in 1860, owing to the persistent representations made by the various bodies comprising the circulating department, in which they complained of insufficient remuneration and other grievances, an Inter-departmental Committee of Inquiry was held, composed of the principal authorities, assisted by the Assistant-Secretary of the Treasury. This committee occupied itself with the subject matter of the memorials which had been presented. The result was a report in which they recommended a slight increase of force, and a small increase in wages. Whatever the increase of force that was recommended, it was not before it was needed. As for the increase of wages it was not only insignificant, but the manner of its application betrayed it at once as only a temporary stop-gap hesitatingly offered by a parsimonious department anxious to obtain the most credit out of the transaction. Before the public the letter-carriers were represented as coming in for another departmental legacy, but the microscopic benefit was still further diminished by being confined to the “men now in the service,” so that “men newly appointed to the minor establishment would come in on the old and lesser rates of pay.” Even this slight improvement in the conditions of the service was to be confined to the men who had agitated and put the department and its Inter-departmental Committee to some little trouble and expense. In the year 1866 Lord Stanley of Alderley, then Postmaster-General, felt constrained to prohibit all outside public meetings which were called for purposes of promoting agitation among discontented postal officials. Lord Stanley issued an order prohibiting such open meetings on pain of dismissal. However it may have been justified at the period of its introduction, it is interesting to note that successive Postmasters-General allowed it to remain practically in abeyance for the next twenty-five years. Either Lord Stanley’s order was forgotten, even in the most stormy periods between 1871 and 1874, or the different public heads of the department felt a reluctance to reintroduce it. It was not till 1890 that a definite prohibition of the right of public meeting based on this order was issued by Mr. Raikes.