Again, some little time after this great public demonstration, the leader of the agitation, Booth, found himself suspended from duty by order of the Controller. It was not that impending dismissal had any terrors for him, but he was determined to avoid if possible the humiliation of it. With his usual readiness he decided to take the bull by the horns in his own fashion. He conceived the idea that unless some such step as he contemplated were taken at once, his dismissal, which he knew had been recommended, would this time be certain. He hurried off to the printers who usually did such work for the movement in those days, but was told the men could not be prevailed on to work after the usual time. Booth said he had a job which would engage them all night, and being told that it was quite impossible, asked to see the men in a body. He came, he saw, he conquered, and the men agreed to stop the night through for the production of a cartoon which had been roughly sketched out. It took three hours to prepare the lithograph-stone, three draughtsmen being simultaneously engaged on parts of the sketch. During the night and early morning four or five thousand copies were printed off, and by ten o’clock they were being sold like hot cakes in St. Martin’s-le-Grand and all over the City. To ensure their sale and circulation they were virtually given away to the street-hawkers, who retailed them at a penny apiece. The first batch was soon exhausted, and before the day was over as many thousands more were sold. The pictorial lampoon had little of artistic merit to recommend it; it was fearfully and wonderfully made; the drawing was vile even for caricature; but the letterpress, the scriptural quotations wittily applied, and the illustrations together, told. The broadsheet contained four or five separate illustrations having reference to the recent great procession of postal employés to Cannon Street Hotel, “in defiance of official threats”; the question of Sunday labour, hit off by the figure of a portly bishop offering a tract on Sunday observance to an overladen postman; the recent postal petition to Parliament, and cognate matters. Booth, suspended from duty, was represented by a figure on a gibbet, intended as the mental vision in the mind of the official who had ordered it; while disposed about in odd corners of the cartoon was a “spy-glass,” “the bullet,” “ye sack,” labelled “Post-Office persuaders.” It did not bear criticism, but as the work of a single night it was interesting; and, what was more, it had some of the effect intended. The suspended leader was restored to duty the day following.