The Duke of Argyll—he of the “silvern tongue”—succeeded Lord Canning, and showed the same aptitude for hard work which had distinguished his predecessors. His quickness of apprehension, promptitude in generalisation, and that facility in composition which made of his minutes models of literary style, were unusually great. When he left the Post Office he addressed to its Secretary a letter of regret at parting—an act of courtesy said to be rare. The letter was couched in the friendliest terms, and the regret was by no means one-sided.
Lord Colchester, the Postmaster-General in Lord Derby's short-lived second Administration, was another excellent chief, painstaking, hard-working, high-minded, remarkably winning in manner, cherishing a positive detestation of every kind of job, and never hesitating to resist pressure on that score from whatever quarter it might come. His early death was a distinct loss to the party to which he belonged.
For Lord Elgin, who, like Lord Canning, left the Post Office to become Governor-General of India, my father entertained the highest opinion alike as regarded his administrative powers, his calm and dispassionate judgment, and his transparent straightforwardness of character. “He is another Lord Canning,” the postal reformer used to say; and that was paying his new chief the greatest compliment possible.
So far, then, as my father's experience entitled him to judge, there are few beliefs more erroneous than that which pictures these political, and therefore temporary masters of the Post Office—or, indeed, of other Governmental departments—as mere “ornamental figure-heads,” drawing a handsome salary, and doing very little to earn it. The same remark applies to my father's last chief, who was certainly no drone, and who was ever bold in adopting any improvement which seemed to him likely to benefit the service and the public.
Hitherto the reformer had been fortunate in the Postmasters-General he had served under; and by this time—the beginning of the 'sixties—everything was working harmoniously, so that Mr (afterwards Sir John) Tilly, the then Senior Assistant Secretary, when contrasting the present with the past, was justified when he remarked that, “Now every one seems to do his duty as a matter of course.”
But with the advent to power in 1860 of the seventh chief under whom my father, while at the Post Office, served, there came a change; and the era of peace was at an end. The new head may, like Lord Canning, have had knowledge of that hostility to which the earlier Postmaster-General, in conversation with Rowland Hill, alluded. But if so, the effect on the later chief was very different from that upon Lord Canning. At this long interval of time, there can be no necessity to disinter the forgotten details of a quarrel that lasted for four years, but which will soon be half a century old. Perhaps the situation may be best expressed in the brief, and very far from vindictive reference to it in my father's diary. “I had not,” he wrote, “the good fortune to obtain from him that confidence and support which I had enjoyed with his predecessors.” Too old, too utterly wearied out with long years of almost incessant toil and frequently recurring obstruction, too hopelessly out of health[224] to cope with the new difficulties, the harassed postal reformer struggled on awhile, and in 1864 resigned.
He was sixty-eight years of age, and from early youth upward, had worked far harder than do most people. “He had,” said an old friend, “packed into one man's life the life's work of two men.”[225]
FOOTNOTES:
[199] The Commissioners were Lord Elcho, Sir Stafford Northcote, Sir Charles Trevelyan, and Mr Hoffay.