To its credit be it said then, that postal agitation has not been altogether confined to capturing the enemies’ cattle, or to striving for yet a bigger share of the loaves and fishes. It has only had to discover its duties and responsibilities to immediately lay claim to them, and to strenuously assert its right to fulfil them. It has always maintained the principle of combination as a principle, while it has long and persistently protested against the exclusion of postal servants from the full enjoyment of civil rights and the untrammelled exercise of the franchise. It has lost few opportunities of championing the cause of the weak against departmental intolerance, and silently and unseen it has often stayed the hand of official persecution at the very moment it was raised to strike. It has triumphed ultimately where often it has seemed to have failed. It has fought for and won the one right accorded to every free-born British citizen who was not a postal official—the right of free speech and open public meeting.
When, as an unpretentious little organisation, numerically weak and modest in its programme, it was first started by a few London postmen and letter-sorters, it was doubtless prompted principally by the very human desire to improve their own workaday lives and to benefit their wives and children. It need not be claimed that they were animated by any higher or nobler motive.
But as time went on, “new occasions taught new duties,” and as the sphere of their operations almost insensibly widened, so they readily accepted the responsibilities attaching to their character as the wing of a forward movement.
BEGINNINGS OF COMBINED AGITATION—THE COMPULSORY SUNDAY LABOUR QUESTION—FIRST PUBLIC PROTEST AT EXETER HALL.
That the spirit of discontent in the Post-Office manifested itself so far back as over half a century ago, will probably somewhat surprise most people outside the postal service itself. Possibly even farther back than that, some traces of discontent and effort at agitation might be found; but in those obscure days, however the working conditions of the service may have justified it, all such effort must have begun and ended with a few individual insubordinates, whose names are buried in oblivion and the official records. But it has to be remembered that in the earlier days of the Post-Office the very conditions under which the members of the working staff were introduced into the service almost precluded the possibility of organisation for the redress of grievances. Indeed, it may be well understood that in the pastoral days of the good old times—when life went slower, and when there was an absence of that feverish rush and hurry so characteristic of the present everywhere, and of the Post-Office in particular—postal officials were the happy inhabitants of a sort of Sleepy Hollow. In a word, probably there was little discontent in the earlier days, owing to the system of appointment by patronage. At least, there could have been very little open and avowed discontent, and much less could it have been organised.