It is not the purpose of these pages to enter into the long and pitiful story of the hatreds and jealousies that Palmer’s appearance at the Post Office excited, nor does the subject in hand admit any extended study of Palmer’s own character. When he went to the Post Office as Comptroller-General, he went with a determination to be unfettered in his actions, and expected to be supreme in fact, although nominally responsible to the Postmasters-General. At this period the Post Office, which had staggered on from job to job from its very inception, and had been purged from time to time only to settle down on every occasion into a new era of corruption and theft of every degree, from the most pettifogging pilfering up to malversation of funds on a monumental scale, was riddled through and through with scandals. There had long been a succession of joint Postmasters-General from 1690, when Sir Robert Cotton and Mr. Thomas Frankland were appointed; and that double-barrelled office, although conducted by those first incumbents in an efficient and altogether praiseworthy manner, had long degenerated into a political appointment. Cotton and Frankland had been more than official figureheads. They had resided at the General Post Office, and were hard-working and conscientious servants of the public. Their successors degenerated into impracticable officers of State, who usually only took part in Post Office work to the extent of signing official documents they never read, and never actively interfered but to perpetrate some new job, or--for they commonly were violently jealous of one another--for the purpose of undoing some already existent scandal set agoing by their fellow Postmaster-General.