Undoubtedly the status of the postmaster has risen considerably, and in large towns he occupies a high and influential position among the men of business. His immediate superior as a rule is the surveyor of his district, but the postmasters of the largest towns in the United Kingdom are their own surveyors. These postmasterships are the prizes of the professions, and they include Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Belfast, Cardiff, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Hull. The salaries attached to these posts vary from £725 to £1000, and the postmasters are frequently Civil Servants who have passed the highest examinations on entering the Service, and they are invariably men of superior education, ability, and experience. Yet so long does it take to root out an old association of ideas in the mind of the British public, that a postmaster is still regarded in the minds of many people as merely a man who sells stamps and perhaps fancy articles. Let me take the city of Liverpool as an illustration of how the growth of Post Office business has raised the importance of the postmaster. In the year 1775 there was only one postman in the town, and by the year 1900 the numbers had risen to 800. It is true that in 1775 the staff was already considered inadequate. A petition was sent up to London in that year asking for another postman, but it was not granted. The reply, however, did not deal with the necessities of the case, but declined to accede to the petitioners' request on the ground that “not more than one letter carrier has yet been allowed to any one town in England.” So firmly established even then was the power of precedent in the official mind. In the year 1839 the weekly number of letters and newspapers dealt with at Liverpool amounted to 103,201, and in 1900 the number had risen to 4,823,694. Of course, all the other large towns in the Kingdom could show similar increases in proportion to their size, and these figures take no account of the increases in other kinds of Post Office business which have been equally significant.