A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day. H. G. Swift
to accept every humiliation the department chose to put on them. In its desire to govern according to its conception of a benevolent despotism it too commonly provided its employés with a grievance, or a succession of grievances, arising from its attempt to shape their workaday lives by rules of military discipline and restrictive regulations better fitted for a penal settlement than for free men and citizens of selected character and intelligence.
Such was the attitude of the department and the general conditions of the postal service when the earlier would-be reformers essayed to urge their plaint, and, in the most legitimate manner, to strike a blow for freedom. The men who have been alluded to as those who were first to engage in agitation and the first to incur the as yet unknown danger of arousing the resentment of officialdom against such daring innovations, it must be acknowledged, made up in moral fibre what they lacked in experience and methods of organisation. At any rate, they deserve to be remembered kindly by those who afterwards benefited by their efforts. They were the first to cut away the undergrowth, and to make the straight and solid path possible. If fault be found with their methods, it has only to be said that their mistakes were such as generally come in the experimental stage of almost every enterprise.
If it be thought that the happenings and incidents with which they were connected or of which they were the authors are here invested with undue importance, it will be recollected that the men who were identified with those happenings were among the first actors in an interesting little industrial drama. It will perhaps not be lost sight of that the incidents themselves, though insignificant if taken singly, none the less are important links in the chain, and necessary parts of a whole. Some acknowledgment is due to these men if only that they were the humble pioneers of an industrial movement of a special character. Not only this, but because they kept abreast of the tide of progress when it was nothing less than dangerous to do so.
If it be objected that every grievance complained of—the conditions of service, insufficiency of pay prospects and promotion, deprivation of civil liberty and the right of combination reduced to a meaningless farce—have had and still have their counterparts in every other department of the State, that objection in itself scarcely lessens the justification for the action taken by the agitators. The reasonableness or otherwise of their methods is another matter which it is proposed to deal with later on as this narrative unfolds itself. If it be urged that the policy of attempting to force concessions from a Government department has been a more or less selfish and sordid one, it must be conceded also that principle has always entered largely into it. That their sole consideration was not getting the greatest material benefit at little cost, and that it was not with them entirely a question of more bread and butter and less work, is pretty well proved by the risks which postal agitators have run and the sacrifices they have cheerfully made. It has never been an easy matter for a man to demand his just dues in a Government office. The attitude of mind towards the subordinate staffs in the Post-Office has not essentially altered since the days when they publicly hanged men for letter-stealing. That was only a little more than sixty years ago, and if the asperities of administration have been somewhat softened of late years, it is only through the force of public opinion, and because the men have learnt lessons of appeal which render it almost impossible for officialdom to persist in methods of repression for any length of time. It is because the liberty of the working-classes has been so enlarged that they can no longer withhold a modicum of it from postal servants. But there is not wanting the evidence to show that something of the same spirit which, in the olden times, sent working-men to the hulks and penal servitude for attempting to band themselves and their mates together for the purpose of safeguarding their few interests from a greedy and rapacious employer was alive still until quite recently, even if it has altogether died out to-day. The postal servant seeking to better his position or daring to complain still labours under far greater disadvantages than the mechanic or the handicraftsman. A postman, a sorting-clerk, or a letter-sorter, if he be dismissed from his employment cannot pick up his bag of tools and offer himself to the next workshop, for the simple reason that he has no tools, and his trade is one of such a peculiar nature that it is wanted nowhere outside the Post-Office. Nor is a telegraphist much better off in that respect. Dismissal from the service has generally meant very much more to the postal official than to the ordinary artisan. He not only lost his immediate source of livelihood but his future prospects, his hopes of a pension, towards which he had contributed, his character and everything were gone, and he had to face the world afresh and take his stand in the battle of life against those with every advantage over him. And dismissal was particularly easy in the earlier times, when a suspicious and malignant officialdom could construe the smallest sign of disaffection into insubordination. Thus it will be seen it was no child’s play to engage in agitation twenty or thirty years ago, and the men who did so evidently did not enter into it for the love of the game altogether. There must have been something very rotten in the State of Denmark when men were goaded into what was to them desperate methods, and with so many odds against them, just for the sake of improving the conditions of their servitude. It shows that they must have felt their grievances keenly; it shows that in some degree at least that spirit of resistance to wrong and injustice to which we owe so much animated and sustained them throughout. In those days postal agitators stood almost alone, receiving very little sympathy from the press or the public, and equally as little assistance from the various trades unions, simply because postal grievances, which have always been difficult of understanding, were much more so then, and because it was difficult then to make people believe that men in permanent Government employment could have grievances of any kind. That the trades unionists of the country were slow to rally to their assistance or to proffer them practical sympathy is better now understood and made allowance for, for postmen and letter-sorters were not readily recognised as a separate craft by the various unions of ordinary artisans; they could claim no trade kinship with them; they were neither this nor that, but a sort of ugly duckling in the legitimate brood of artisanship.
Fortunately a more intelligent understanding and a better feeling now exist, and has existed for some years past. But even to gain this simple recognition that a postal official with a grievance battling against wrong was a man and a brother entitled to admittance into their ranks, was not easily obtained even when they sought it. Even the men themselves were chary of accepting the position of professed trades unionists, and it was many years before the objections associated with declared trades union principles and methods were waived by the men of the Post-Office. The fact is they remained for long uncertain as to their exact relationship to the general industrial and labour movement. There was some amount of mutual distrust between outside trade organisations and combination in the Post-Office, and both parties failed to see distinctly what there was in common between them. It must be admitted that despite their awakening so far, the postal agitators still preserved something of that reserve which may have been easily mistaken for pride or perhaps priggishness; and, indeed, felt that an open connection with trades unionism might damage their chances of redress, and alienate the support and sympathy of the few public men on whom they relied. Besides, it has to be considered that the trades-union doctrine was not sufficiently accepted to be yet accounted respectable. But all that is now past; it has been rendered both respectable and respected by almost universal acceptance, and postal agitation owes not a little to it. And if postal agitation owes more to the spirit of trades unionism than the latter does to any postal effort, then, to claim no more for it, perhaps trades unionism has no reason to feel ashamed of its poor relation who fought a battle in its behalf years ago. They maintained its principle within that most unlikely and unpromising of places, a Government office, against hostile officials who were backed up with inexhaustible reserves and the best artillery.
That the solid advantages gained through agitation have not even up to the present day fully compensated for the sacrifices made, the time, the trouble, the energy, and the money expended on it, can perhaps be freely admitted. Yet the same holds good of every other movement of higher pretension, social and political. Men with a purpose count the moral advantage as well as the material gain. If only considerations of this nature had always weighed in the past, our Merrie England would to-day be divided into slaves and slave-owners.
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