Page:The web (1919).djvu/353

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barn—but they did not wish to blow up their valuable hen, so they removed her before touching off the charge.

Santa Barbara County—not the town—reported 94 cases of disloyalty and sedition, 24 male alien activities and 20 female alien enemies, besides the 34 I. W. W. cases. The man does not live who can predict the end of all the vast social problems which will have to be worked out eventually on this beautiful Pacific slope.


The A. P. L. in San Diego

We have on our southern borders the Mexican situation, not yet settled, but one day to be settled. Germany did all she could to set Mexico on our heels, and her atrocious Zimmerman note was one more instance of her venomous but blundering diplomacy. Perhaps she wonders still how we got that note when it first was despatched from Mexico; and how we sat tight so long with knowledge of it in our possession. This is by way of saying that the old Spanish city of San Diego is an important naval base, located close to the edge of the intriguing border of the Southwest—and a borderland is always a zone of espionage.

It is, therefore, not surprising to say that San Diego had 65 cases of alien enemy activities and 842 cases of disloyalty and sedition, 286 instances of propaganda and 32 I. W. W. cases. For the War Department, there were 554 investigations, 98 of these being character and loyalty investigations. So that, on the whole, it may be seen that this once indolent city of the Southwest, now a busy center of affairs, also had an A. P. L. during the war.

There is a curious range of cases reported from one and another corner of the country to the National Directors of A. P. L. Sometimes an extraordinarily troublesome case has had very little at bottom; and again a simple case often turned out big. Yet again, a case might have all the ear-*marks of simplicity and prove full of trouble. For instance, if you were sent to arrest a woman, you customarily would not expect her to disclose herself to be a walking arsenal of offensive weapons—a woman's portative appliances, lacking pockets as they do, not seeming to give her natural facilities for heeling herself in any way practical for quick