The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

APPENDIX H. 461
I was given to understand that I might count on the support of
the Postmaster-General and the Chancellor of the Exchequer ; and
that if I showed that I possessed the requisite administrative powers,
(the subsequent full acknowledgment of which happily relieves me
from the necessity of entering on that part of the subject) I might
look forward to be promoted at no distant period to a position of
higher authority, which was understood at the time and subsequently
admitted to mean the post of sole secretary.
Without for a single moment doubting the sincerity with which these
promises were made, I nevertheless, after much anxious deliberation,
arrived at the conclusion that they were not sufficiently explicit to
justify me in placing myself in a position so liable to failure, which in
the public mind would naturally be attributed to defects in the
system itself, or to mismanagement on my part, rather than to opposing
influences which could not be generally known.
My prospects of effecting improvements under the discouraging
circumstances in which I knew I should be placed did not seem
clear enough to justify me in incurring the risk of becoming myself
an instrument for destroying that universal reliance on the soundness
of my project, which I felt to be my surest means of obtaining ultimate
success.
But I was in the hands of my friends, and I shall not be censured
for deferring to the opinion of such men as Mr. Warburton, Lord
Overstone, Mr. Hawes, and Mr. Raikes Currie.
I consequently entered on my present office, and have now served
under three Postmasters-General ; and I gladly avail myself of this
opportunity to express my deep sense of the kindness and confidence
with which I have been treated, and my full recognition of the efforts
made from time to time, with more or less of success, to remove im-
pediments and to give freer scope to my exertions ; but the evils
which I foresaw and which have come upon me in full measure are
beyond the reach of palliatives. The system on which we are proceeding
is radically bad, and stands scarcely more strongly condemned
by myself than by my colleague Colonel Maberly.
Though possessed of secretarial authority, I am, if I may so
express myself, a general almost without an army when I entered
the office I found, of course, the clerks regarding the senior
secretary as having the first if not the only claim on their services ;
and without desiring for a moment to reflect on them or on any one
else, I become views,
every day more convinced that without harmonious
a joint jurisdiction, even supposing equality to be fully and