490 HISTORY OF THE GRANGE MOVEMENT; OR, 



Post-Office men engaged in a rather hard struggle to 

 make both ends meet. Some of us had ventured to 

 ask for higher pay, and had been favored with the 

 usual sympathetic but depressing reply, that it was 

 regretted that the circumstances of the case would not 

 justify any addition to our salaries, etc., etc. 



"Feeling as we did sharply, the general rise in the 

 cost of living, especially in the price of all articles of 

 clothing consequent on the American War, one or two 

 of us had already bethought ourselves of cooperation 

 as a means of lessening our difficulties. I, for one, 

 being a Liberal in politics (for there are some few 

 Liberals in the Civil Service) had watched with interest 

 the doings of the Rochdale Pioneers, but could not at 

 all see how to apply their experience to our own case. 



" One day, however, two office friends came to me 

 it was, as I well remember, a foggy, gloomy day in 

 November, enough to make one more than usually des- 

 pondent and declared once for all that they must 

 either have more to spend or manage to spend less. 

 They had given up all hope of more pay, and as a last 

 resource they proposed that we should try to spend less 

 by means of cooperation. Their idea was that we 

 should induce a number of Post-Office men to procure 

 their supplies of coal from some one coal merchant, in 

 the expectation that by the largeness of the united 

 order, and by the payment of ready money, we should 

 obtain a considerable abatement in price. Talking the 

 matter over, we resolved to try buying on this plan ; 

 but we soon agreed that coal was not a good article for 

 the experiment, and in the end we decided to make a 

 beginning with tea. That very afternoon one of us on 

 his way home called at a celebrated wholesale house 



