Baron F. de Rothschild followed Earl Compton, with the statement: “The Postmaster General may well say it is no business of ours to interfere between the civil servants and himself, but here I would venture to ask him whether the civil servants are not quite as much our [i. e., the public’s] servants as they are those of the Postmaster General?” Baron de Rothschild went on to say that through an error made in the course of the transmission of a telegram his betting agent had placed his money on the wrong horse, causing him to lose a considerable sum of money. Such mistakes would not occur if the telegraphists were better paid.
Sir A. Borthwick regretted “the increasing tendency to invoke the direct interposition of Parliament between the Executive Government and the Civil Service.”
The Postmaster General concluded his statement with the words: “I hope that after the statement which I have been able to make, the House will recognize the claim of every Government that the House shall not interfere with matters of Departmental administration, except where it thinks fit to censure the Minister in charge. So long as a Minister occupies his position at the head of a department, he ought to be allowed to occupy it in his own way. I venture to hope that the House will leave questions of this sort in the hands of those who are directly and primarily responsible for them, in the belief that grievances of the servants of any department are not likely to lack careful consideration, and, I believe, just and fair treatment.”
A few months later, the Postmaster General made this statement in the House of Commons: “I wish to correct one misapprehension. It is supposed that the position of the Government is that only the market value should be paid for labor of this sort [the nonestablished post office servants]. Those who sat in the Committee [of Supply] will remember that I laid down a different doctrine the other day. My own view is, that while the market value must be the governing consideration, because we are not dealing with our own money, but with the money of the taxpayers, the taxpayers would wish that, in applying that standard to those in the Public Service, we should always bear in mind that a great Government should treat its employees liberally.”[149]
Earl Compton failed to carry his motion in 1890; and in the following year he made another unsuccessful attempt, moving: “That, in the opinion of this House, it is desirable that a Select Committee be appointed to inquire into the Administration of the Post Office.”[150]
Mr. Ambrose, speaking against the motion, said: “Questions between capital and labor and between the Government and its employees should not be influenced by motions in the House. We are all subjected as Members of this House to all manner of whips from employees of the Civil Service and the Post Office, and I know that when the statusof the Civil Service clerks was being settled some time ago, there was, among Members generally, a feeling of disgust at the telegrams and letters being received almost very minute from people seeking to influence our votes on some particular question of interest to them.”
Mr. Raikes, Postmaster General, enumerated in detail the concessions made to the telegraphists and letter sorters in 1890 and 1891, at a cost of $1,035,000 a year, and added: “and to all this, not one single reference has escaped those who have spoken.” He concluded with the words: “It would never do if, in order to encourage the vaporings of three or four of those gutter journals which disfigure the Metropolitan Press, Members of this House were to make the grave mistake of throwing discredit upon a body of men like the permanent officials [Executive Officers] of the Post Office, of whom any country might be proud, with whom, I believe, any Minister would be delighted to work, and of diminishing the authority in his own Department of a Minister, who, whatever may be his personal deficiencies, at heart believes that he has done nothing to forfeit the confidence of this House.”
A few months later, when the House was considering the Estimates of the Post Office Department, the Postmaster General said: “Economists [advocates of economy] of former days would have been interested and surprised by the general tenor of the debate to which we have just listened. The great point used to be, as I understand, to show a large balance of revenue to the State [from the Post Office], and to make a defense against charges of extravagance in the past. But we have now arrived at a time when the opposite course is to be taken, and the only chance a Minister has of enjoying the confidence of this House is to point to a diminished balance of revenue and to a greater expenditure on the part of the department….” In 1891-92 our telegraph expenditure will increase by $3,000,000, while our revenue will increase by $1,700,000; “the reason is to be found in the very comprehensive measures framed in the course of the last year for the improvement of the position of the staff.”[151]