No question which has arisen in the internal management of the Post Office has presented more difficult problems for solution than that of the condition of the postal employees with reference to hours of labour, promotion, and remuneration. The first complaints which attract our attention during the period under discussion came rather from outside the service as a protest against Sunday labour in the Post Office, but the fact that many of the postal servants were deprived of their holiday and often needlessly so deprived was a real grievance advanced by the employees themselves. It had been the policy of the Post Office for some time not to grant any application for the withdrawal of a Sunday post if there were any dissentients to the application. In 1850 all Sunday delivery was abolished for a time, but this hardly met the approval even of the strict Sabbatarians, and the rule was promulgated the same year that no post should be withdrawn or curtailed except upon the application of the receivers of six sevenths of the letters so affected. Of the rural posts in the United Kingdom at that time more than half did no work on Sunday and about half of the remainder had their walks curtailed, while in certain cases a substitute was provided on alternate Sundays. A committee reporting on the question in 1871 advised that it should be made easier to discontinue a Sunday delivery by requiring that a Sunday rural post should be taken off if the receivers of two thirds of the letters desired it, that no delivery in the country should be granted except upon the demand of the receivers of the same proportion of letters, and that the principle of providing substitutes on alternate Sundays should be more generally adopted. This report was favourably received and its recommendations adopted in the early seventies. In London and many of the provincial towns there is no ordinary Sunday delivery, and so little advantage is taken of the opportunity for express delivery on Sundays that there is presumably no strong demand for a regular Sunday delivery. Various measures advocated for the relief of the town carriers were also adopted.[312] [312] _Acct. & P._, 1872, xxxvi, 337, pp. 1-2; _Rep. Commrs._, 1872, xviii [c. 485], pp. 1-5; _Rep. P. G._, 1872, p. 6; _Parl. Deb._, 4th ser., xciv, coll. 1358-60, 1364-65.