CONCLUSION. Sir Rowland Hill, at the time of his retirement, "remained," in the words of the Treasury Minute, "full as ever of ability, energy, and resources, and of disposition to expend them for the public good." He was broken down in health--broken down, not so much by the great work that he had done, as by the hindrances that, time after time, had been wantonly and cruelly piled up against him in the discharge of his duty. "Men will one day think of the force they squander in every generation, and the fatal damage they encounter by this neglect."[248] "He stands," wrote Mr. Gladstone a few months before he left the Post Office, "pre-eminent and alone among all the members of the Civil Service as a benefactor to the nation." He had not been two years in the service of his country when the Chancellor of the Exchequer of that day, "a man not of many words, or, in manner, of overflowing heart,"[249] told him that, were the Secretaryship to the Post Office vacant, he was the man whom he should recommend to fill it. In a most trying and severe apprenticeship he had proved his thorough fitness for the post, and had convinced Mr. Baring that there was, at all events, one inventor who could be a man of business.[250] But before long his force was squandered by Sir Robert Peel. For the next four years his work lay outside the Post Office. With the return of the Whigs to power, he was once more brought back to the great work of his life. Unhappily the squandering of force did not come to an end. Seven years more had to pass before he was made sole Secretary, and placed in a position of real and undoubted power. For these seven years he had been, to use his own words, "a general almost without an army." For the next six years his work went on smoothly and rapidly under a happy succession of able and high-minded Postmasters-General. But a change came all too soon. In the Post Office certainly he should have had no master over him at any time. There even the ablest of our statesmen might well have sat at his feet. "He is King of Postal Reform," wrote a Postmaster-General of a later date, "and I felt myself a very small subject in waiting upon him." But under the able chiefs under whom he served from 1854 to 1860 he worked with full contentment. This happy period came to an end, as has been seen, with the appointment of Lord Stanley of Alderley. His force was once more, and for the last time, squandered.