Thus, it had been demanded that letters should no longer be carried past the office from which they were to be distributed to some office further on, whence they would have to return, but that the distributing office should receive them at once. This demand, not then new, nor yet worn out, I had to meet by showing that the letters for one office were at such times mixed up with those for other offices, and therefore could not be dropped in passing, while the delay in sorting could not be absolutely prevented unless every post town in the United Kingdom made up a bag for every other post town, which, as there were then about one thousand post towns in all, would involve the daily despatch, transmission, and opening of a million of bags in each direction, an immense majority of which would contain no letters whatever. At the same time I assured my auditors that I should do my best to render the Post Office as useful as possible, and that I would carefully inquire into all the defects in its management which they had brought to my notice.[35] To this task I addressed myself on the morrow. Even here, however, I found old impediments to the progress of improvement; for when I proposed to Mr. Banning, the postmaster of Liverpool, to keep open the Money Order Office to a later hour without waiting for instructions from London, my advice was met by the presentation, though with many apologies, of the Postmaster-General's restrictive minute, the issue of which had been previously condemned, but unfortunately not revoked. One consequence was that I refrained, for the time, from attempting improvements at Manchester, lest I should encounter another copy of the minute there. On my return I pressed on the Postmaster-General the importance of reconsidering the arrangements affecting my position before his leaving town, which he promised to do, perhaps the more readily because he was much pleased with what I had effected at Liverpool. The consideration, however, produced no immediate result. "_September 28th._--Banning, who called upon me to-day, reports that the restriction of the Liverpool receiving-houses to stamped and unpaid letters, accompanied as it is by an extension of time for posting, is working very satisfactorily; so are the other improvements which, not requiring Treasury sanction, have been carried out; but I find that though the Treasury sanction [to certain further improvements] has been received a month, no steps whatever have as yet been taken thereon. The reply to the weekly inquiry made as to matters in arrears has been, that the papers were with Colonel Maberly, and beyond this nothing could be learnt till to-day, when, getting impatient at the delay, I set Armstrong to learn the cause, when it appeared that the papers were not with Colonel Maberly at all, but in the first clerk's room, where they had been 'mislaid' as usual."