The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

CONCLUSION.
SIR ROWLAND HILL, at the time of his retirement,
" remained," in the words of the Treasury Minute,
" full as ever of ability, energy, and resources, and of
He
disposition to expend them for the public good."
was broken down in health broken down, not so
much by the great work that he had done, as by the
hindrances that, time after time, had been wantonly
and cruelly piled up against him in the discharge of
"
his duty. Men will one day think of the force they
squander in every generation, and the fatal damage
they encounter by this neglect."" 3 ' " He stands," wrote
Mr. Gladstone a few months before he left the Post
Office, " pre-eminent and alone all among the members
of the Civil Service as a benefactor to the nation."
He had not been two years in the service of his
country when the Chancellor of the Exchequer of
that day, "a man not of many words, or, in manner,
of overflowing heart," t told him that, were the
Secretaryship to the Post Office vacant, he was the
man whom he should recommend to fill it. In a most
trying and severe apprenticeship he had proved his
thorough fitness for the post, and had convinced Mr.
Baring that there was, at all events, one inventor who
* Carlyle's "Life of Sterling" (edition of 1857), p. 221.
t See Vol. II., p. 389.