As a survival of the system in vogue in the old twopenny-post days, the greater part of the working staff—that is to say, those subordinates who afterwards came to be described as the manipulative part of the machinery, were for many years after the introduction of the penny post recruited from those in whose behalf some influence had been exercised or invoked. Many were the sons of old servants of the aristocracy, others the sons or relatives of the dependants of M.P.’s, of Justices of the Peace, of lawyers, and public men more or less eminent. Every notability who could exercise any influence with the postal authorities, or with those who were _en rapport_ with the powers that were, had their nominees. It was then next to impossible for a mere outsider, whatever his merits, to obtain employment under the Postmaster-General without this golden talisman. This system, so general in the earlier days, has been adverted to only in order to show one reason for there being so little discontent openly manifested, and to explain why agitation did not assume an organised form till later in the century. For however slow may have been the times, doubtless the conditions of the postal service were not even then so Arcadian as to stifle entirely the feeling of discontent in some. But the system of nomination by influence and patronage, and what in these days might be called by the uglier name of nepotism, was better calculated to foster a feeling of dependence in the majority, and one of grateful loyalty in many. This, too, it has been already pointed out, was in the days when the principles of trades unionism were little studied and little understood, even so far as they had taken root in the minds of the working-classes. Combination in any shape or form was in fact little sympathised with by those whom it sought to benefit, and in Government offices particularly would have been anathema to the authorities, or, at any rate, received with fear and aversion.
While the good old principle of “looking after Doub” prevailed extensively in every other Government office, it was almost paramount in the Post-Office; and this being so, it would be surprising to find anything but a state of stagnant contentment existing among the working staff. If not exactly a state of stagnant contentment, the readiness to assert a principle, and to resent encroachment on existing rights and privileges, would certainly not be forcibly in evidence. Whatever official wrongs, if any, they may have been subjected to at the hands of their superiors, they showed no willingness to be awakened to a sense of them. The tide of Chartism beat in vain against the grim walls of the Post-Office; the fluctuations of trade disputes, strikes, and lock-outs interested them only in a casual way, if at all; while the bare idea of organised opposition to the wishes of the authorities, however arbitrary, would have spelt downright treason. They were recruited from a class of men who, if they had not always been brought up in the paths of virtue, had always gone along the line of least resistance, which was that of conventional respectability. Once in the Post-Office, they had a character to keep up, and they were not as other men who had to work for their living with dirty hands. They felt that their Queen and country had reposed a confidence in them by selecting them for the responsible position they held. They were something midway between lawyers’ clerks and menials of the royal household. They doubtless felt they were very superior persons, though their wages were meagre and their uniform scanty; but the authorities were like unto little gods to them, and so they took it for granted that Heaven had established a natural gulf between them. Still they were the children of patronage, and of fathers whose only ambition was to see their sons settled in a Government situation; for a Government situation was for their sons the Mecca and the goal of those people who always kept good and paid proper respects to the parson and their rent regularly to the squire. And when the sons got there they felt they were a chosen few, invested with a caste and a distinction which entitled them to hold their heads a little higher than the people living in the same street. The consciousness that his neighbours occasionally pointed him out as the “gentleman who works in the Post-Office” more than atoned for his inability to wear fashionable clothes and a top-hat like his superiors.