Lord John Manners had descended from his pedestal of office and returned to the comparative obscurity and inactivity for which his attainments so well fitted him. Before leaving the Post-Office he had the satisfaction of knowing that, from one point of view, he had done at least one thing well; he had stifled discontent and reduced the common herd of postal workers to their proper level of uncomplaining Government serfs. Under his régime had grown and flourished naturally a system of petty tyranny and sycophancy which rendered open honest protest well-nigh impossible, which compelled men to endure it or accept the alternative, resignation or dismissal, and which made any attempt at combination as impossible as in the prehistoric days before the penny post. The condition, so far as the limitations on their liberty were concerned, was every whit as bad as prevailed years before the agitation. Nearly all the reforms which the late agitation had started so hopefully to attain had been left undone. The violent _coup_ for which Lord John Manners was responsible had taken the heart out of the men, and they had to take the postal service as they found it or leave it for others to be forced into their places from the stress of competition outside. The hide-bound official tenet that the permanency of Government employment more than compensated for all shortcomings was now being interpreted as if to mean that this quality of “permanency” not only compensated for but justified and rendered necessary the employment of petty persecution, the deprivation of almost every claim to citizenship, and the curtailment of most ordinary human rights. The utter contempt of the officials for men’s common rights and privileges as human beings, their churlish indifference to the common claims of manhood, have to some extent already been shown. Even the “permanency” of employment was commonly nullified on the smallest pretext, and seniority and long faithful service counted for little against the whim of a tyrannical supervisor. If it was creditable to the public service to have it manned by those who suffered from grievances yet dared not complain of them; if it was profitable to the Treasury to have the rank and file of the postal service remain underpaid and forced labour exacted from them; if it was requisite that the woes of the men should be hidden alike from the public and from the higher permanent officials henceforth, most of the credit, most of the honour, was due to Lord John Manners. If it was well that all inquiry should be stifled and the men be kept in servile subjection by superiors whose common conception of their duties was that of Russian jailers; if it was necessary in the course of proper discipline that men should be treated as though they had no soul to call their own, Lord John Manners, by the one act by which he achieved this success, deserved the gratitude of his country.