After the debate the leaders of the agitation crowded round the members in the lobby, Roebuck particularly was besieged by the disappointed men; but he shook himself free of them with the air of a man who had done his duty, and was determined to court failure no further. “Tear ’em” Roebuck was evidently chagrined and as annoyed as his clients, and he turned on them almost with a snarl. “You see I can do no more; the Government won’t interfere,” said he, and strutted away. The Government had left them to their fate; but pressure was privately brought to bear on Lord John Manners, who was now Postmaster-General. The refusal of the Government to interfere on behalf of the oppressed and aggrieved postal employés after all the promises of the Tory party, and after all the patronage extended to them publicly, resulted in such a feeling of resentment and disappointment among all classes of the service, that Booth the leader had the utmost difficulty in holding his followers in check. There was, indeed, one abortive attempt at a strike among the Hull postmen, and the spark might have ignited the whole had Booth and his associates given encouragement to it. It wanted but a breath from the agitators at this moment to fan the whole into a blaze. Booth during this time never lost heart; he was as indefatigable as ever; scarcely a day passed but what he interviewed somebody or was himself interviewed. He had carried the art of interviewing to such an extent that he several times personated the secretary of the postal movement, Hawkins, for the purpose of getting editors and pressmen to say a word or two in behalf of the baffled, but as yet not defeated, agitation. By personating his own secretary in getting himself interviewed he thus evaded the official rule which forbade any postal servant communicating with the press, and which there is little doubt would have been mercilessly enforced against any one in the service caught doing it too openly. But however little they had to expect from the permanent officials, they felt that with a Postmaster-General as representative of the party from which only recently they had received so much sympathy and patronage, active hostility would not be allowed to be carried too far. Moreover, they felt pretty safe in conjecturing that, come what may, what the law officers of the late administration had hesitated to carry to a completion would not in a hurry be resorted to under the new Government of the party which included so many tried and pledged friends of postal reform. True, the Conservative Government, which the postal vote had in some measure helped to bring back to power, had so far disappointed them in not at once taking up their case as they were led to believe it would. But they were aware that their grievances were still occupying the attention of a large number of the members on both sides of the House, and that a large amount of influence was being brought to bear on the Postmaster-General.