Page:The web (1919).djvu/126

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number, deported a few, and revoked citizenship for only two. It was said that the close of the war would set free a great many of these persons who will resume their residence, if not their former activities, in America. It is true that we have not executed a single German spy. That is an astonishing commentary on our laws and our Government in times such as these. Let those who are wiser than the writer of this book can claim to be after the extraordinary experience of studying the real America, pass on the wisdom of such leniency in its bearing on later Bolshevism in America. Other nations certainly have acted otherwise. Sometimes they have smiled at us as the easy mark of all the nations.

Certainly, however, whatever may be the personal belief of many citizens of this country, our public documents prove the wish of our Department of Justice, all its Bureaus and all its auxiliaries, to be just and more than just, generous and more than generous, to those not in accord with our laws and institutions,—a strange contrast for the reflection of those "simple and kindly" folk who for four years have exulted in the outrages Germany has wrought upon the world, and who for four years have given the world the most detestable examples of treacherous espionage.

At times we did teach some of those gentry that there was a God in Israel. If as yet we have deported few or none of those interned aliens—all of whom, and a hundred thousand more, surely ought to be deported—if we have received back into our tolerant friendship those who have been for some time warned out of our Government zones, at least we have trailed down certain of the more active cases of Kultur spreading in America. Space confines us to very few of those, chosen almost at random from the thousands at hand in the records.

The chief centers of alien enemy activity in this country, as might have been expected, were the great industrial towns and cities. It was in these places that the A. P. L. fought its hardest fights and achieved its greatest triumphs.

The great city of Seattle was no exception. The report of the splendid work it did all through the far Northwest