Sir Albert Rollit[200] supported Captain Norton with the words: "For a long time past there had been a very strong and general feeling in the service that many of the men had been the victims of something amounting almost to an imposition, however unintentional, on the part of a public Department. Strong terms had been used in the course of the debate, but he should endeavor to deal with the matter on the basis of what he believed to have been a contract between those employees and the Post Office. It was not difficult to show that that implied--or, he might even say, express--contract had induced many to enter the service, only to find that the contract was afterward departed from by one of the contracting parties, the State." Mr. Keir Hardie supported Captain Norton's Motion with the argument that the concessions made by the Tweedmouth Committee had imposed no additional burdens upon the taxpayers, for that committee merely had allocated a small portion of the extra profit made by the Post Office to the Post Office servants who made that profit. Mr. Keir Hardie at one time has held the office of Chairman of the Independent Labor Party,[201] an organization that brings to bear upon the British municipal governments a pressure similar to that here shown to be brought upon the House of Commons. [Sidenote: _Members of Parliament coerced_] Mr. Gibson Bowles said: "He was aware that many honorable Members who brought forward the position of servants of the State, did so against their own desires, because of the almost irresistible pressure placed upon them by the servants of the State, who were at the same time electors.... He supported the Secretary to the Treasury in resisting this particular amendment, because it was one of many which tended to illustrate a form of tyranny that was becoming unbearable, and which tended seriously to injure the character of this House as making its Members the advocates of classes, sections, and little communities, instead of being trustees not for them alone, but for the whole community." Mr. Austen Chamberlain, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and representative in the House of Commons of the Postmaster General, the Marquis of Londonderry, said he "supposed it would not be unfair to say that an officer joining the British Army had a prospect of becoming a field marshal." As to the telegraphists, "all that the Government ever had held out to them was a prospect of a certain number of them attaining something beyond the ordinary maximum" of $800, to which any man could rise by the display of ordinary manipulative ability and the observance of good conduct. Under Mr. Fawcett, in 1881 to 1884, one telegraphist out of every 6.3 telegraphists had risen beyond $800. In 1890 the proportion in question had been exactly the same. In 1902, the proportion was one in six, or, "practically the same."