When Palmer first introduced his plan of mail-coaches he proposed that, while the contractors supplied coaches and horses and the men to drive them, the guards should be the servants of the Post Office, and should, considering the dangers of the roads, be retired soldiers, who, from their past training and habits of discipline, would be reliable servants and men capable of defending the mails against attack. This advice was not followed, and the first mail-guards were provided by the contractors, who employed such unsatisfactory men that in a very short time the Post Office was obliged to make the position of a mail-guard a Post Office appointment and the guards themselves servants of and directly responsible to the Department. Placed on this footing, they were by no means fellow-servants with the coachmen, but their official superiors, and not properly concerned in any way with the passengers or any unofficial parcels or luggage. In practice, however, they took part in all these things, and although the coachmen were technically under their orders, it was only when ill-assorted and quarrelsome men came together on one coach that any disputes arose. Mail-coaches had not long been established before the guards, those protectors of his Majesty’s mails, presuming upon their position, became the tyrants of the road. Pennant, writing in 1792, tells how, in his district of Wales, “the guards, relying on the name of royalty, in the course of the Irish road through North Wales, committed great excesses. One, on a trifling quarrel, shot dead a poor old gatekeeper.... In Anglesey another of these guards discharged his pistol wantonly in the face of a chaise-horse, drawing his master, the Rev. John Bulkeley, who was flung out and died, either on the spot or soon after. These guards shoot at dogs, hogs, sheep, and poultry as they pass the road, and even in towns, to the great terror and danger of the inhabitants.” As with the mail-guards, so with the mail-coachmen. “It has been a common practice with them to divert themselves with flinging out their lashes at harmless passengers, by way of fun. Very lately, one of these wretches succeeded so well as to twist his lash round a poor fellow’s neck in the parish where I live. He dragged the man under the wheels, by which one of his arms was broken.”