Then came the announcement on March 10, 1897, of the recommendations of the Tweedmouth Committee, and the consequent disappointment of the whole of the postal service. That disappointment became the stronger the more they realised that their confidence and patience, so sorely tried, had been so ill repaid. The voice of discontent broke out with renewed vigour, and found expression in public meetings all over the country once more. There was a general demand that the whole thing should be thrown into the melting-pot and recast. Fiercely-enthusiastic and crowded meetings of postmen and telegraphists were held in London, and among the latter particularly there were growing warnings of a renewed disposition to adopt a strike policy.
Certainly among the postmen and the telegraphists the application of the scheme threatened only to make confusion worse confounded. Considering the amount of discontent it had revived, and the manner in which it bid fair to strain the loyalty of postal servants to the uttermost, it seemed the Treasury and the Government were by no means to be congratulated on their bargain, costing, as it was supposed to, the enormous sum of £275,000 a year. So far from effecting its purpose, it appeared rather to be producing a spirit of open and unveiled revolt among the very classes it was supposed to pacify. A recognition of this circumstance and the influence of pressure brought by members of Parliament at last induced the Postmaster-General, the Duke of Norfolk, who had now succeeded Mr. Arnold Morley, and Mr. Hanbury, Secretary to the Treasury, to consider the advisability of a further inquiry, presumably with a view to some revision of the scheme so strongly objected to. The fault of the situation lay not so much with the malcontents, or any proneness to agitation on their part, as to the innate defects and anomalies of this costly and cumbrously ineffective scheme; and members of Parliament, and a considerable section of the press, held to that view in calling on the Postmaster-General to institute a further inquiry. It had been urged from every postal platform throughout the United Kingdom that the scheme, that all servants of the Post-Office had looked to to bless them, had produced quite the opposite effect. From the postal servants’ point of view, the Tweedmouth Committee had acted the part of Balaam reversed. The scheme, instead of proving the plentiful cornucopia they had hoped for, and felt they merited, had turned out a Pandora’s box, full of evils, but with not even hope at the bottom.