It was not very long before the authorities were surprised to receive an application from the men to be allowed to hold a mass meeting inside the Post-Office, and the loan of the Newspaper Branch was requisitioned. Whatever may have been the hesitation in giving official sanction to so large an order, the required permission was, nevertheless, granted after some delay. The object of this meeting was to discuss the terms of a postal petition to Parliament, and possibly it was the nature of the project which caused the authorities to deem it wiser to confine its discussion within their own walls than to drive it into the public arena. And just here it is necessary to point out that at this time the fraternal feeling between the London letter-carriers and the letter-sorters was stronger than ever. The several public meetings and the encouragement they had received, with the numerous injunctions from outside friends and sympathisers to keep together, begot a spirit of comradeship which sunk all petty distinction of class, and Booth’s activity did much to cement them. The sorters were slightly better off than the letter-carriers in point of pay and status, but they had grievances much in common, and they had learnt more than ever to recognise that they were useful and necessary to each other in the fight for freedom, a decent wage, and better conditions of work. The army of discontented letter-carriers had been very much increased since 1860. In that year the levelling-down principle, first introduced in 1854 by Rowland Hill and a Commission which then sat, was carried one step further by the formation of an inferior grade to be known as auxiliary or assistant letter-carriers, originally a hybrid class, something between postal labourers and the ordinary letter-carriers. They were badly paid and worse treated; they shared all the misfortunes and hardships of the letter-carriers without their advantages as to pay and prospects. They were a cheap class of labourers in the rich postal vineyard, for whom it seemed the authorities thought any treatment good enough, if only because they were cheap. Their working hours were spread over even a greater period of the day than were those of the full-blown letter-carriers. Their position in the service was most precarious. Their wretched conditions of service soon impelled them to organise among themselves, but their organisation was as feeble as their funds were shallow, and though nominally they were a separate body, yet virtually they were to be counted in with the general army of malcontents. They gave and received whatever moral support was possible. They joined in where they could; they attended the postal meetings, and assisted in some degree towards the general betterment of the service.