The occasion which principally provided the officials with an excuse for imposing on the force still further was the introduction of the halfpenny post; and when this came to be recognised by the public as a boon, the men became the victims and the sufferers. The reduced rate for newspapers and circulars was soon taken advantage of by company promoters very largely. The notorious promoter, Baron Grant, who did everything on a colossal scale, sent in prospectuses, referring to the Emma Gold Mine, at the rate of half a million at a time, completely swamping the Newspaper Branch, where such correspondence was disposed of. The authorities’ only method of meeting the emergencies which so frequently arose was to get the extra work of the public (which already meant so much more profit to swell the revenue) done by forcing the overburdened and underpaid men to do it for nothing in the time which should otherwise have been theirs. The method of forced labour, so analogous to that form of slavery which aroused the righteous indignation of the civilised world when practised a few years later by the Boers on the unfortunate Kaffirs, was not only thought proper but persisted in by the officials of an English Government department. Whatever excuses, if any, that might be made for the rapacious East-End sweaters, could not be made for the profit-minting monopoly of St. Martin’s-le-Grand and those who guided its machinery. The men protested again and again, but without avail. Refusal to comply with this form of tyranny or worse, imposed in the name of duty and discipline, would have meant rank insubordination, punishable with dismissal without character. Probably their protests never got beyond the branch superintendent, to whom they complained; but the authorities ought not to have been wholly blind to the men’s treatment. If there was no Treasury grant of money to cover the cost of extra duty of this nature, as was pointed out, then the parsimony and meanness of the authorities was only to be excused by their utter laziness in not endeavouring to get such a demand met honestly and fairly.