Any officer who is retired with a pension, on account of ill health, before he is sixty years of age, may, if he recovers his health, be recalled to duty at the discretion of the head of his Department or of the Treasury. Under such circumstances the officer receives the salary of his new office and so much of his pension as shall be sufficient to make his total income equal to the original pension. Under the foregoing rule two officers were made respectively postmaster at Bristol and postmaster at Hastings. Before the Tweedmouth Committee, Mr. Uren, President of the Postmasters' Association, protested against such "blocking of some of the best offices by pensioners.... Here are two good offices, one with $4,000 a year, and the other with $2,750, which are taken up by pensioners who recover their health, and so block a line of promotion.... I only mention these as the two most recent cases with which this sort of thing has happened, but they are not the only occasions by a good many, which I am instructed to bring before your Committee as a fair subject for consideration." Mr. Crosse, another witness, added: "The Postal Clerks' Association also desire to endorse the evidence put forward by the Postmasters' Association as to the anomaly and injustice of certain postmasters being retained in the service who are in the receipt of pension and salary from the Department."[388] [Sidenote: _Mechanical Equality Demanded_] Prior to August, 1891, the postmen of metropolitan London were divided into two classes: the second class, with wages rising from $4.50 a week to $6, by annual increments of $0.25 a week; and the first class, with wages rising from $6 a week, to $7.50, by annual increments of $0.25 a week. In consequence of the rapid growth of the postal business, however, the postmen frequently passed through the second class into the first class, not in six years, but in from two to five years. But the rate of promotion from the second class into the first differed materially in the several metropolitan branch offices, because of the unequal growth of business at those several offices. That inequality of promotion violated the ideal[389] of the civil servants, which is, that all should fare alike; and therefore, the postmen demanded that the division into two classes be abolished, and that every postman should rise, by stated annual increments, from the initial wage of $4.50 to the final wage of $7.50. But the abolition of classification would put an end to the possibility of those rapid passings through the stages between $4.50 and $6 that had been of frequent occurrence in the past in some of the metropolitan branch offices. By way of compensation for the loss of that chance the postmen demanded that the annual increment be increased beyond $0.25 a week.