Lord John Manners triumphed, and the smaller officials had their revenge. There was no doubt about that; the men went back to their duties thoroughly cowed. It must have been a glorious hour for the Postmaster-General, and doubtless he felt that he had routed the enemies of society for ever. And so that the victory of the Postmaster-General should be fully complete, a subscription to provide the dismissed sorters with a Christmas dinner was stopped by order of the authorities. Cowed as the men were, an attempt was made to send round a subscription-sheet, but the movers were warned of the consequences, and they were officially terrorised into doing nothing for the victims of Lord John Manners’s discipline. Several Parliamentary friends of the postal cause immediately set to work to induce the Postmaster-General to reverse his harsh decision. Particularly assiduous was Mr. A. J. Mundella, but he was doomed to get nothing but humiliation for his pains. Mr. Mundella used the whole weight of his personal influence with the Postmaster-General and the permanent authorities, only to find himself bandied about from one to the other till his sensitive nature became wounded and disgusted. The studied discourtesy shown him by the permanent officials especially he made a matter for some complaint inside the House, as he felt that more consideration than had been accorded him was due to his position and dignity as a public man. These arbitrary dismissals destroyed the last vestige of confidence in the Tory party for some years to come among the letter-sorters. If the men had been dealt with merely for signing and sending forward a memorial, there was no justification for such harsh punishment. There would have been no justification for any kind of punishment, beyond the refusal to accede to their request. But it was rendered too patent to every one that it was seized on simply as a pretext for taking a revenge for the part they had played in the recent agitation. There was no discipline that demanded such a cowardly reprisal. It was worthy only of the narrow-minded aristocrat whose principal claim to distinction was his cherished little drop of blue blood, and whose contempt of the masses, of all who worked for their living, and all that was plebeian, was rendered shamefacedly notorious by his published lines. For Lord John Manners was the author of that silly and impudent pretence at an epigram—which shook the world with laughter, and covered the writer with derision and scorn—even from critics of his own party. His disgraceful lines, which ran— “Let Arts and Commerce, Laws and Learning, die, But leave us still our old Nobility!”—