After careful consultation with my brothers, I resolved on making a formal application upon the subject. In my letter, which is given in the Appendix (A), after referring to past difficulties and previous applications, as also to the distinct expectation which had induced me to accept my present post, after appealing to his lordship as "to my having made every possible effort to surmount and avoid the obstacles incident to my present position," I submitted a list of the chief improvements (all of them, however, of a comparatively minor character) which, under his lordship's authority, I had been able to effect in the postal service. I then described the improvements effected in the Money Order Department, expressing my confident expectation that in the course of the year it would become self-supporting,[58] and that by additional measures, then in progress, it would in time be made to afford a satisfactory profit. I adduced the facility with which the necessary changes, many of them difficult and complicated, had been effected in this department since it came under my immediate and exclusive direction, as affording fair presumption that with similar means at my command a like success might be obtained elsewhere. I remarked that my appointment to this department had been avowedly to ascertain my competency for practical management, and submitted that by the results such competency was proved. After adverting to some of the most important and pressing improvements remaining to be made, to the opposition which these had always encountered, to the cautious and tentative process by which alone they could be effected, to the impracticability of carrying on this without "immediate confidential and uninterrupted intercourse with those most conversant with details, or on whom the duty of immediate execution would devolve," or without "the exercise of an influence and authority limited only by due subordination to" his "lordship," I again urged the fulfilment of the expectation held out to me. I strengthened my claim by reference to symptoms of dissatisfaction in the public with the slowness of progress, natural enough in its ignorance of the difficulties under which I laboured, but through which I was exposed to attacks which I might not repel, and suffered in my reputation while quite unconscious of blame. This letter was promptly acknowledged as follows:-- "Dublin, January 6th, 1849. "MY DEAR SIR,--The subject of your letter of the 3rd is a matter for more than mere departmental consideration, and all I can do upon it is to communicate it to the authorities at the Treasury. I shall do so without delay. "Most truly yours, "CLANRICARDE."