Some of the provincial postmasters and other officials, misunderstanding the case, joined in the clamour, and went far on the way to defeat a measure planned for their relief. Others were more discerning, and the postmaster of Plymouth wrote to say that at his office alone thirty men would be relieved by an enactment which was “one of the most important in the annals of the Post Office.” The agitation showed how prone is the public to fly to wrong conclusions. Here was Rowland Hill striving to diminish Sunday work, and being denounced as if he was seeking to increase it! It goes without saying that, during the agitation, numerous letters, generally anonymous, and sometimes violently abusive, deluged the Department, and especially the author of the relief; and that not even Rowland Hill's family were spared the pain of receiving from candid and, of course, entirely unknown friends letters of the most detestable description. Truly, the ways of the unco gude are past finding out. While the conflict raged, many of the clergy proved no wiser than the generality of their flocks, and were quite as vituperative. Others, to their honour be it recorded, tried hard to stem the tide of ignorance and bigotry. Among these enlightened men were the Hon. and Rev. Grantham Yorke, rector of St Philip's, Birmingham; the Professor Henslow already mentioned; and Dr Vaughan, then head-master of Harrow and, later, Dean of Llandaff. All three, although at the time personal strangers, wrote letters which did their authors infinite credit, and which the recipient valued highly. The veteran free-trader, General Peronnet Thompson, also contributed a series of able articles on the subject to the then existing _Sun_. Some of the newspapers at first misunderstood the question quite as thoroughly as did the public; but, so far as we ever knew, only the _Leeds Mercury_—unto whose editor, in common with other editors, had been sent a copy of the published report on the reduction of Sunday labour—had the frankness to express regret for having misrepresented the situation.[186] Other newspapers were throughout more discriminating; and the _Times_, in its issue of 25th April 1850, contained an admirable and lengthy exposition of the case stated with very great clearness and ability.[187] “Carrying out a plan of relief which I had suggested as a more general measure when at the Treasury,” says Rowland Hill in his diary, “ I proposed to substitute a late Saturday night delivery in the nearer suburbs for that on Sunday morning. By this plan more than a hundred men would be forthwith released from Sunday duty in the metropolitan district alone.”[188] He further comments, perhaps a little slyly, on the “notable fact that while so much has been said by the London merchants and bankers against a delivery where their places of business are, of course, closed, not a word has been said against a delivery in the suburbs where they live.”[189]