The history of labour in the Post-Office has been a history of restraint and repression on one side, and of determined, persistent, and, in the end, more or less successful resistance on the other. The awakening of the trades-union spirit, and the manifestation of discontent, so long as it confined itself to a few London letter-carriers, was not formidable enough to excite either the anxiety or the animosity of the department. Discontent, disorganised, sporadic, and uncertain in its utterance, could either remain ignored or dealt with summarily. It was only when agitation assumed much larger dimensions that it began to arouse that mingled feeling of apprehension and aversion which in itself became the means of aggravating still further those very evils which the authorities aimed at suppressing. Time and again the authorities, while complaining of the heat, yet added fuel to the fire. Unionism in the Post-Office has ever been regarded as something verminous, something to be stamped out, something impertinently out of place in a Government office, and its leaders treated as breeders of sedition. And this has been so many years after the principle of trades unionism has at last been reconciled to Respectability and folded in her arms. Slowly, step by step, labour in the Post-Office has gained something of a recognition of its value; but it has been forced to fight its way ofttimes with manacled hands and tape-tied feet. Happily, however, the story of postal agitation and the spread of combination throughout the postal service is not made up entirely of failures, contumacies, inflictions, and punishments. That combination in this branch of the public service has had to fight hard for its very existence from the beginning till now is perfectly true. It has been uphill work throughout, and its wounded have been left by the way. But in its struggle against the forces of bureaucracy it has snatched a victory here and there; it has received rebuffs, and even now and again courted defeat, but it has had its exultant moments of victory too. And, on the whole, there is little to regret that the fight so far has been fought; for where men have a principle at stake perhaps, to paraphrase a great dead poet, ’tis better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all.