The nature of the claim made by the Chairman London Branch of the Postal Telegraph Clerks' Association is forcibly illustrated by the following incident from the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Civil Establishments, 1888. Mr. H. A. Davies, the official representative of the clerks in the Receiver and Accountant General's Office of the General Post Office, had made a similar demand on behalf of the men whom he represented. The Chairman asked him: "Does a man enter the public service on the assumption that all the upper places are to remain the same as when he enters.... If you and I enter the public service finding a certain Department, the Post Office or any other, with twenty posts above to which we had a reasonable hope, if we behaved well, and showed merit; if administrative reform takes away five of these posts, are we entitled to compensation, because that is what it [your allegation of grievance] comes to? Can you say, there being no contract whatever between me and the State when I entered the office as a clerk, no contract whatever that I should attain to a higher post, except when there is a vacancy, that I have a claim [to compensation] when administrative reform takes away some of the other places?" The spokesman of the Post Office clerks replied: "If I were defending that [position] to Parliament, I think I should say that the country has a certain duty toward men who, when they entered the service, had, judging by the precedents of their office, a fair prospect of reasonable promotion, and that if any economy is effected by subsequent administrative reforms, the sufferers deserve some consideration."[377] * * * * * From 1885 to 1888 Mr. Lawson, M. P.,[378] was a Member of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the Civil Establishments. In March, 1889, he intervened in the administration of the Post Office by asking the Postmaster General how many vacancies there were in the first class of telegraphists at the Central Telegraph Office, London; how long those vacancies had been open, and whether the Postmaster General had received a petition from the second class telegraphists for their promotion; and whether there was anything to prevent him from complying with the request. The Postmaster General replied that on January 1, 1889, there had been 53 vacancies. "To thirty-four of those vacancies I have made promotions within the last few days; and this, practically, is an answer to the petition of December, 1888."[379] The reader will recall that in February, 1888, Mr. Lawson had intervened on behalf of a letter carrier who had been dismissed in 1882. In 1889 to 1892, and 1897 to 1904, Mr. Lawson was a Member of the London County Council.