“Since I received it I have referred to the letter which you addressed to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the 29th of July last, and to the Minutes of the Board of Treasury respecting your appointment, and have given to the subject generally the best consideration in my power. It had indeed been brought under my notice by Mr. Goulburn, at the time that his letters of the 11th of July and of the 11th of August were addressed to you. “I am bound to state to you that I entirely concur in the opinion expressed by Mr. Goulburn in that of the 11th of August, that the continued employment of an independent officer, for the purposes for which it is urged by you, would necessarily lead either to the entire supercession of those who are by their offices responsible for the management of the Post Office department, or to a conflict of authority, highly prejudicial to the public service. “I entertain a due sense of the motives by which your conduct in respect to Post Office arrangements has been actuated, and of the zeal and fidelity with which you have discharged the duties committed to you; I cannot doubt that there are still important[333] improvements in those arrangements to be effected, but I must presume that they can be effected through the intervention of the regularly-constituted and the responsible authority, namely, the Postmaster-General, acting under the superintendence and control of the Board of Treasury. “I have, &c., “ROBERT PEEL. “Rowland Hill, Esq.” My dismissal, therefore, was now complete and absolute. My right to complete my own plan was denied, all opportunity for so doing withheld, and the measure was to be handed over to men who had opposed it stage by stage, whose reputation was pledged to its failure, and who had unquestionably been caballing to obtain my expulsion from office. Of the feeling under which Mr. Goulburn acted in this matter I have already given my opinion; indeed, I had now become fully aware that the responsibility of the act did not rest on him. As regards Sir Robert Peel, with whom the decision of course lay, to suppose that the reasons which he gave were those which constituted his real ground of action, or that he could have considered his letter as any valid answer to mine, would be an imputation on his understanding which I shall not venture to make. By whatever necessity he may have been constrained, I cannot but think that as he wrote he must have felt some little of that painful feeling which unquestionably pressed hard upon him in more than one important passage of his political career. The following reply closes the correspondence:—[334] “Bayswater, October 18th, 1842.