The Mensheviki delivered a final ultimatum, demanding that all Ministers and _yunkers_ be released, that all newspapers be allowed full freedom, that the Red Guard be disarmed and the garrison put under command of the Duma. To this Smolny answered that all the Socialist Ministers and also all but a very few _yunkers_ had been already set free, that all newspapers were free except the bourgeois press, and that the Soviet would remain in command of the armed forces…. On the 19th the Conference to Form a New Government disbanded, and the opposition one by one slipped away to Moghilev, where, under the wing of the General Staff, they continued to form Government after Government, until the end…. [Graphic, page 276: Meeting announcement] Announcement, posted on the walls of Petrograd, of the result of a meeting of representatives of the garrison regiments, called to consider the question of forming a new Government. For translation see App. XI, Sect. 6. Meanwhile the Bolsheviki had been undermining the power of the _Vikzhel._ An appeal of the Petrograd Soviet to all railway workers called upon them to force the _Vikzhel_ to surrender its powers. On the 15th, the _Tsay-ee-kah,_ following its procedure toward the peasants, called an All-Russian Congress of Railway Workers for December 1st; the _Vikzhel_ immediately called its own Congress for two weeks later. On November 16th, the _Vikzhel_ members took their seats in the _Tsay-ee-kah._ On the night of December 2d, at the opening session of the All-Russian Congress of Railway Workers, the _Tsay-ee-kah_ formally offered the post of Commissar of Ways and Communications to the _Vikzhel_—which accepted…. Having settled the question of power, the Bolsheviki turned their attention to problems of practical administration. First of all the city, the country, the Army must be fed. Bands of sailors and Red Guards scoured the warehouses, the railway terminals, even the barges in the canals, unearthing and confiscating thousands of _poods_ of food held by private speculators. Emissaries were sent to the provinces, where with the assistance of the Land Committees they seized the store-houses of the great grain-dealers. Expeditions of sailors, heavily armed, were sent out in groups of five thousand, to the South, to Siberia, with roving commissions to capture cities still held by the White Guards, establish order, and _get food._ Passenger traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railroad was suspended for two weeks, while thirteen trains, loaded with bolts of cloth and bars of iron assembled by the Factory-Shop Committees, were sent out eastward, each in charge of a Commissar, to barter with the Siberian peasants for grain and potatoes….