Although I was then engaged in avocations more highly remunerative than the proffered appointment, I at once avowed myself ready to accept it if I could be assured of sufficient authority to secure the success of my measures--a stipulation which, while reasonable under any circumstances, was rendered imperative by my former experience of the obstructions and injury that improvements were exposed to in consequence of the state of feeling which prevailed at the Post Office. I was given to understand that I might count on the support of the Postmaster-General and the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and that if I showed that I possessed the requisite administrative powers, (the subsequent full acknowledgment of which happily relieves me from the necessity of entering on that part of the subject) I might look forward to be promoted at no distant period to a position of higher authority, which was understood at the time and subsequently admitted to mean the post of sole secretary. Without for a single moment doubting the sincerity with which these promises were made, I nevertheless, after much anxious deliberation, arrived at the conclusion that they were not sufficiently explicit to justify me in placing myself in a position so liable to failure, which in the public mind would naturally be attributed to defects in the system itself, or to mismanagement on my part, rather than to opposing influences which could not be generally known. My prospects of effecting improvements under the discouraging circumstances in which I knew I should be placed did not seem clear enough to justify me in incurring the risk of becoming myself an instrument for destroying that universal reliance on the soundness of my project, which I felt to be my surest means of obtaining ultimate success. But I was in the hands of my friends, and I shall not be censured for deferring to the opinion of such men as Mr. Warburton, Lord Overstone, Mr. Hawes, and Mr. Raikes Currie. I consequently entered on my present office, and have now served under three Postmasters-General; and I gladly avail myself of this opportunity to express my deep sense of the kindness and confidence with which I have been treated, and my full recognition of the efforts made from time to time, with more or less of success, to remove impediments and to give freer scope to my exertions; but the evils which I foresaw and which have come upon me in full measure are beyond the reach of palliatives. The system on which we are proceeding is radically bad, and stands scarcely more strongly condemned by myself than by my colleague Colonel Maberly.