The Postmen’s Union was accordingly taken out of the hands of the Labour Union, and its control was taken over by a distinct executive. Mr. Burns and Mr. Champion withdrew their offer of services, and allowed Mr. Mahon to take the helm of the clumsy and ill-fitted vessel that required much clever steering. Those who originally came into the movement only as friendly helpers were now developed into leaders and masters of the new organisation. Mr. Mahon now assumed the part of dictator, and the fact that he was allowed to do so can only be accounted for on the supposition that the other members of the executive, Mr. Bennet Burleigh and Mr. Conybeare and the rest, were paying more attention to their own private business. W. E. Clery meanwhile had used the whole weight of his influence to induce the postmen’s executive, as represented by Mr. Mahon, to switch the organisation on to more constitutional lines of action, but the very attempt at counselling moderation seemed only to have begotten suspicion regarding the honesty of his intentions. Mr. Mahon and a few about him were under the impression that the letter-sorters and the indoor staffs were in duty bound to make common cause with them, and if only their co-operation could be secured the walls of St. Martin’s-le-Grand were bound to fall. Had the indoor staffs of the postal side of the service been induced to join hands, there can be no doubt that such a federation would have proved very troublesome to the authorities. But Clery, who was by this time virtual leader of the sorters’ organisation, seeing that the postmen under their outside leader were determined on pursuing a heroic course and adopting a policy of defiance, steadily set his face against any combination of his class with the Postmen’s Union. Mr. Mahon and many of the postmen themselves thought it would greatly assist them if the indoor classes could be induced to join them, and it was sought to set aside the authority of Clery with his own class by making overtures direct to the sorters. This was done by a printed manifesto, but Clery thought so little of its effect that he contemptuously printed it with a few lines of comment in his own organ, the _Post_, of June 7, 1890. Yet in spite of this free advertisement there was no response to the appeal of the general secretary of the Postmen’s Union, and, so far as was known, not a single sorter joined. The manifesto was a creditable literary production, for Mr. Mahon could write as well as speak, but the only thing he could boast of having done in a period of eight months was to have formed “a rapidly-growing union with a weekly contribution.” From this declaration it was further gathered that the principal reason for its existing at all was to assert “the right of public meeting and demonstration,” in defiance of an official regulation now so modified as to be no longer regarded as harsh. This was the main point of difference between the postmen’s policy and that of the sorters. The sorters had won the right of public meeting fairly, squarely, and constitutionally, and Mr. Raikes was pleased to acknowledge it; the postmen, as led by their outside leader, asserted the full right of public meeting without restriction and without control from headquarters. It was a very proper thing perhaps, but in the circumstances it was hardly the time of day to demand it. The sorters, by quietly pursuing constitutional methods, were very little behind the postmen in point of outside meeting, only in the one case it was acknowledged as a right and in the other they committed outlawry, and by so doing injured their own case. The Postmaster-General was severely autocratic in rule, yet, when properly approached, he had gone considerably out of the beaten tracks of officialdom in granting the right of public meeting conditionally. Only a little while longer and the last shackle was to be knocked off. Yet this did not suit the postmen’s leader, and his followers were made to think that it could not be accepted by them. They were betrayed into pursuing the ideal of an abstract principle in preference to urging their more useful and legitimate demand for boots and better wages. The boots and other things to which they were as justly entitled were forgotten in the glamour of the right of public demonstration. Instead of making do with the farthing rushlight for the time being, they committed the fatal mistake of running after the will-o’-the-wisp which was to land them in the morass of humiliation and disaster.