The resentment of the department showed itself almost immediately after the illicit publication of the memorial in the public press. The signatories were sent for by the Controller, and catechised as to what they knew about its appearance in print before it had actually reached the hand of the Postmaster-General. They were told it was a gross breach of official confidence, only a little less heinous than offering personal insult to the public head of the department. They would be held responsible for sending it to the press for publication, and nothing now remained but to go home and pray for forgiveness and await developments. In vain the men protested their innocence, and pointed out that copies of the proposed memorial freely circulated among the men for their approval before it was submitted through the official channel; indeed any one but themselves might have forwarded a copy to the _Times_. But it was to no purpose they sought to defend themselves on these grounds, and they were practically found guilty on the spot. That was one indictment only in regard to this unfortunate memorial. The second was that they had dared as the humblest servants of her Majesty’s Postmaster-General to convey to him, by means of this aforesaid illicitly-published memorial, that they could not accept as fully satisfying all their claims, the scheme which he had so beneficently prepared for them. What right had they to say they could not accept the scheme, or anything else which a Postmaster-General had so condescended to provide them with? The poor menials withdrew from the light of the official cadi’s presence, abashed and crestfallen. They predicted that something was about to happen to them, guilty wretches that they were; but they did not know what. While the case was pending, a paragraph appeared in one of the papers to the effect that the indignation of the men in the General Post-Office had now reached such a point that they had decided to petition for the removal of certain supervising officials who had rendered themselves brutally obnoxious to the men throughout. The ringleaders were again, as a natural consequence, suspected of this fresh paragraphic insult to the department; but the men themselves were as indignant as might be the authorities themselves. They all solemnly protested to each other that this foolish blunder was not theirs. The appearance of such a thing at this moment could certainly effect no good purpose, and it seemed difficult to believe that any one of them, knowing that suspicion would most certainly fall on them, and discredit them still further, could have been guilty of such foolishness. Still, repudiate it as they might, they knew the shot would rebound on themselves. There were several among them who did not hesitate to think, that both the memorial and the offensive paragraph had been sent to the press by some one of the creatures of the department with a malignant ulterior motive.