Although the right to exercise the one privilege accorded to every British citizen, that of presenting a petition to Parliament, had up to now been their mainstay and the bulwark of their personal protection, the agitators constantly found that they were the objects of departmental attention. They had been particularly careful, for the success of their movement, to proceed along thoroughly constitutional lines, and nothing could have tempted Booth and his associates to depart from this. As has already been shown, the disappointment induced by the protracted methods of the Government, and the antagonism of the officials to the agitation, was such that it might easily have risen to the point of rebellion had the leaders been so inclined; but they were not; and as it was they had frequently to exercise to the utmost their restraining influence on the men. It was scarcely to be supposed that the authorities would give them any credit for this, and as was only natural, perhaps the leaders were held wholly responsible for the strained relations between the department and its subordinates. Booth and his lieutenants therefore had no mercy to expect from their superiors should they commit themselves. The very surveillance, the constant spying, and every manner of testing and trap-laying to which Booth especially was subjected, would have caused any other man with less fortitude and with a more sensitive temperament to have given up long before he did. But to all the insidious influences to which he was exposed, Booth especially never showed the least concern, but went about his work as though there were never an official to dog his footsteps even to his own door, nor a band of the permanent officials anxiously waiting and watching for the moment when they might reasonably dismiss him with humiliation and degradation. In the official mind in those days, whoever lent themselves to agitation within the walls of a Government office could be little better than desperadoes and conspirators, disloyal alike to the service and the public. It was not to be wondered at, then, that they were regarded as playing a desperate game, which, to go no further, even as yet almost brought them within the clutches of the law. The agitators were not blind to the position in which they stood, nor ignorant altogether of the desire of the authorities to encompass their destruction. Already Booth had been most unpleasantly made aware that his private correspondence had been tampered with in its passage through the post; that, before reaching his hands, the letters addressed to him had been watched for and “Grahamed”—to use an expression which signified the secret methods of opening and overhauling suspected people’s correspondence then, as a survival of the “Espionage Room,” more or less in vogue in the Confidential Inquiry Branch of the General Post-Office. While the department had such a piece of machinery as this at its disposal, it was not going to confine