About three weeks later the "Lord's Day Society" applied to me to receive a deputation, with a view to the total cessation of Post Office business on the Sunday, stating that they were referred to me by the Postmaster-General. As Lord Clanricarde was then out of town, I wrote to him for instructions, feeling, meantime, no small perplexity, because I well knew that, on the one hand, resistance to the expected demand would expose me to attack, and that, on the other, concession would soon produce such an uproar throughout the country as must seriously annoy the Government, and, moreover, raise obstacles to those practical measures of Sunday relief which were already in progress. However, the Postmaster-General having expressed a wish that I should receive the deputation, I called at the Treasury to urge immediate sanction to my last measures on the subject, but found the Chancellor of the Exchequer too much occupied to attend to the business. "_March 30th._--Received the deputation from the 'Lord's Day Society,' consisting of Mr. Cowan, M.P. for Edinburgh, General MacInnes, three clergymen, and others. They had prepared a plan for stopping the mails throughout the kingdom from midnight on Saturday till midnight on Sunday, but I had no great difficulty in satisfying most of them that any attempt of the kind would excite much angry opposition, and consequently that it would be much better, at first at least, to aim at such improvements as most people would concur in." Any impression, however, which I might have made soon faded away, the Society within three weeks again urging their plan, under the erroneous notion that they had found an answer to my objection, and pressing me to undertake it, "as the only man capable of giving it effect." Of course I could only point out the error and decline their request. "_August 7th._--Summoned to the Treasury. Mr. Hayter[61] tells me that he read my minute on the Sunday work aloud to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; that both considered it a very able paper, and that the measure had been sanctioned."