It is admitted that, at first sight, the alteration in question may seem to _increase_ the Sunday duties of the Post Office. In London, to a certain extent, it does. It will require, at the outset, the additional attendance of twenty-five persons (hereafter, possibly, of a somewhat larger number) on Sunday in the London Post Office. {7} That attendance, you will observe is _voluntary_. Nor is it allowed, in any case, to infringe upon the hours of divine service. It is proposed that the whole interval from ten in the morning till five in the afternoon be left perfectly free. {8a} Nor yet would it be correct to represent the alteration as involving any change of _principle_. The attendance and employment of _certain_ persons, the reception and assortment of _certain_ letters, on the Sunday, even in the London Post Office, is no new thing. {8b} The conscience of the Christian community has left _these_ practices unchallenged and unnoticed until now. Such considerations ought to have some weight in our estimate of the present innovation. Still, so far as it goes, and taken alone, the augmentation of the Sunday force in the London Post Office is admitted to be an evil. Is it counterbalanced by any greater good? It is necessary to take a _national_ view of such a question. The Post Office system throughout England is one, not many. The London Office, and the provincial Offices, are but several parts of one connected whole. The question, therefore, is, not whether this Office, or that Office, separately regarded, will be a gainer or a loser by the change; but whether, on the whole, the _aggregate_ of gain or of loss will preponderate; whether, so to say, the Post Office of _England_, as distinguished from that of London separately, or that of York or of Manchester separately, will thus be relieved on the Sunday, or burdened. If twenty-five _additional_ servants are required in the _London_ Office on the Sunday, and _twice_ twenty-five can be _relieved_ on that day in the _provincial_ Offices; the change, so far as it extends, is salutary. Now, if this obvious principle be granted, the question is decided at once. Beyond all contradiction, the present measure is one of relief from Sunday labour to the department _as a whole_. But the opponents of the measure argue thus: Taking the London Office by itself, an _addition_ is proposed to the labours of the Sunday: this is a sinful project: and if it be urged, on the other side, that a tenfold _relief_ will thus be afforded to the _provincial_ Offices, they answer, that this is but _doing evil that good may come_. Yet is not this argument capable of an easy inversion? Are you not, in _resisting_ the proposed relief of the country Offices, on the plea of regard for that of London, doing, in fact, a great evil—not that a small good may come, but that a small evil may not come?