In writing of the activities of the General Post Office, it is difficult to know where to stop, or in that slaughter of the innocents which must always take place when space is not available, to decide who is to be spared. We certainly cannot leave out the Post Office engineer. He often works unseen and unappreciated by the general public, but he has this consolation, that he is indispensable, and in the Post Office of the future he may become the most important man in the service. Sometimes, perhaps, our eye may have been arrested, when passing along a street, by the spectacle of a man apparently attempting acrobatic feats on the top of a telegraph pole, and he will often attract the same curious attention from a London crowd as a fallen horse or a motor car in difficulties. He is probably an employé of the Post Office, and belongs to the Engineer's Department. For several centuries the Post Office was simply a carrier of letters, and it is difficult to realise that a larger portion of its effective work depends at the present day on the skill of the engineer. Since 1870 a sum of over £100,000,000 has been expended in the purchase, maintenance, and extension of telegraph and telephone business, and the expenditure on telephone maintenance alone up to the end of 1908 amounted to nearly £8,000,000. The engineers have during recent years provided a large mileage of underground wires, connecting London with Edinburgh, with the west of England, the Midlands and the south-eastern counties. The need for the engineer's work in the postal service is felt more and more every day. All round our coasts he is erecting and maintaining stations for wireless telegraphy, and if the aeroplane becomes the carrier eventually of our letters, the engineer will be the chief official in the postal as well as the telegraph work of the Post Office. Even now there is an increasing demand for mechanical appliances in postal work. There are the conveyors and stamping machines used in sorting office work, and new developments in this direction are probable in the future. The Engineer-in-Chief's staff numbers about 300, but the Department controls a vast army of men, totalling 10,000, engaged in the manual labour connected with telegraph and telephone business. The importance of the Department is scarcely yet recognised even by the Administration of the General Post Office, which is, naturally, still disposed to run the business on non-mechanical lines, and possibly more importance is attached to old-established branches of the service. But the day of the engineer is arriving, and he will enter into his own before many years are over. Some day, perhaps, the Chief Engineer will be _ex-officio_ the Chief Secretary. And when calculating machines become universal, he may easily become the Accountant-General also.