the bomb, the knife—we must stop at nothing. Germany must triumph over her enemies. I would not hesitate to destroy a whole city for the good of the German cause." After S had been allowed to talk sufficiently, his new friend, who proved to be an A. P. L. operative in disguise, caused his arrest by an agent in the Military Intelligence Division. S was struck speechless when he found he had been trapped. He was held in ten thousand dollars bail at the examination and committed to the Tombs in default of surety. Would he have been admitted to any bail at all in Germany in similar circumstances?
Out in a great city on Puget Sound, the Minute Men Division of the American Protective League, after an exhaustive investigation covering several months, arrested a certain man whom we will call Johnson. He was charged with conspiracy to doctor steel and iron in the Seattle ship-yards with a powerful chemical, intending to commit wholesale murder by wrecking troop trains. He was a pattern-maker employed in a ship-building plant when the Federal officials arrested him as an alleged German spy. At the time of his arrest, he had in his pocket a bottle containing a violent explosive. His scheme was to apply a strong acid to steel and iron in the shipyards, which would destroy these metals by eating them away. He planned to place acid on iron about to be melted, so that the resulting steel products would be valueless and the ship-building program delayed. He was charged with undertaking to damage the more delicate bearings of the ships, so that they would be useless after putting out to sea. It was part of his scheme, as developed by the operatives, to place acids in the journal boxes of cars, with the intent of destroying them while they were under way. The A. P. L. operatives claimed to be conspirators with him. When one of them pointed out that such a wreck would cost a large amount of life, the accused is said to have replied: "Well, what's the odds how we kill them, and what's the difference whether we kill them over here or over there?" That man, like many now behind bars, had no moral sense at all.
Not all of these agents of Germany were men of the mental shrewdness of their great spy leaders. Johnson
