[Illustration: BRITANNIA PRESENTING ROWLAND HILL WITH THE SACK] But these beneficent "red-coated genii" were "cruelly ill-paid" for long and arduous labour. "His walk in life is frequently such a walk that it is a wonder he has a leg to stand upon; for he travels some twenty or thirty miles a day, to the equal wear and tear of body and sole. For this his salary is a guinea a week." Accordingly, when in 1848 Post Office robberies were frequent, _Punch_, without excusing theft, regarded it as the natural result of this miserable pittance. Under-payment has always been a great incentive to dishonesty, and in 1848 we have _Punch's_ assurance that the postmen were the worst paid of all Government employees. The long fight for early closing, for the Saturday half-holiday, and for reasonable Sunday recreation, found unflinching support in _Punch_ from his earliest years. He did not, it is true, profess a burning sympathy with the bank clerks in 1842 when they were agitating for a closure at 4 instead of 5 p.m., but he was wholeheartedly on the side of the shop assistants, especially in the linendrapers' and milliners' establishments. One of his earliest incursions into this controversy took the form of a report of an imaginary meeting of duchesses at Almack's, at which resolutions were passed deprecating, in a contrite spirit, the overworking of milliners' assistants, and establishing an association to persuade dressmakers to reduce the hours of work to eight a day, abolish Sunday work, afford reasonable time to execute orders, provide medical advice and change of air for the sick, and start a fund to carry out these aims (May 27, 1843). These aims have long been realized in all well-conducted shops, but they were something like counsels of perfection in the year of "The Song of the Shirt." But _Punch's_ irony at the expense of inconsiderate shoppers in "Beauty and Business _versus_ Early Shops," and "Directions to Ladies for Shopping," not only tilts at femininity's little ways, but shows that human nature has not materially changed in the last seventy-five years. _Punch_ was moved by the hardships of dressmakers and shop-girls, whom he compared to convicts: "hard labour" was no worse than theirs. He frankly advocated the boycotting of a money-grubbing hosier in Cheapside, who kept his shop open until nine or ten o'clock, though all the other hosiers in that thoroughfare had for two years closed theirs at eight--for that was as far as early closing had reached in the 'fifties. But _Punch_ was always a moderate reformer, very far from being a revolutionary, and he condemned with great asperity an attempt to launch an experiment mildly foreshadowing modern syndicalism:-- [Sidenote: _Syndicalism in the 'Forties_]