On April 10th a petition for inquiring into the state of the Post Office, prepared by myself and in my own name, was presented to the House of Commons by Mr. Baring; and on the following night Mr. Hawes gave notice that Sir Thomas Wilde would call the attention of the House to the same soon after the Easter holidays—a notice, however, which from various causes had to be repeated several times before being acted upon. Of this petition, which appears at length in the Report of the Committee,[341] I will merely mention here that, after reference to my appointment and subsequent dismissal, after statements as to the very incomplete introduction of my plan, evidence as to the hopelessness of its completion being effected by the Post Office, and representations as to the vast interests at stake, I concluded by expressing my desire “to submit the truth of the foregoing allegations to the severest scrutiny,” and by petitioning for the necessary inquiry. This petition was presently backed by another from eight members[342] of the Mercantile Committee, so often mentioned before, in which, after briefly adverting to the beneficial effect of the improvement already made, the petitioners, expressing an earnest desire for the completion of the plan, prayed for inquiry with a view to that end. I now felt that the time was come when my friends should be put in full possession of the facts of the case; and, consequently, having printed all of the correspondence which had been applied for in Parliament, that withheld as well as that granted, I sent copies, marked “strictly confidential,” to the members of the Mercantile Committee, and some others of my friends, prefacing it with an introduction, in which I justified the proceeding—first, by the declaration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, that his denial was made on the ground that the part which had been withheld was unnecessary, no allegation being made as to inconvenience to the public service, and, secondly, by the high authority which I had for saying that I had a right, looking to the nature of the correspondence itself, to official usage, and all other circumstances, to place the whole before the public. This step, taken on April 13th, was on the 19th condemned in the House of Commons by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Goulburn, but defended by the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Baring. It was not until May 1st that I obtained a copy of the return upon which Sir Robert Peel, in the preceding November, based his injurious and erroneous statement that the inland post yielded but £100,000 a-year to the revenue. This return was now laid before Parliament on the motion of Sir George Clerk. In consequence I addressed a letter to the daily papers, in which I expressed myself as follows:— “I have no hesitation in stating that the return, whether considered in regard to its general results or to the division of revenue under the two heads, is utterly fallacious.”