A. P. L. has folded its unseen and unknown tents. It will bivouac elsewhere until another day of need may come. Then, be sure, it will be ready. On the day that the American Protective League disbanded, it had no money in the treasury. It had spent millions of dollars, and had brought to judgment three million cases of disloyalty. There, obviously, unwritten and unknown, scattered in every city and hamlet of America, was a tremendous story, one of the greatest of all war stories, the story of the line behind the guns.
When the men of long or of transient connection with M. I. D. had shaken hands and said good-bye, the National Directors of the American Protective League asked me to stop on and write the history of the American Protective League. And so, in large part, as a matter of loyalty and duty, with millions of pages of records at hand, with a quarter of a million friends I have never seen, who never have seen one another, who never otherwise would know the identity of one another, I began to do something which most obviously and certainly ought to be done. This book is written alike that these quarter million unpaid soldiers may know of one another, and that a hundred million Americans may also know of them accurately, and thank them for what they did.
Before I had done the last page of the strange history, I knew that I had felt an actual reflex of the actual America. I knew that I had been in touch with one of the most astonishing phenomena of modern days, in touch also with the most tremendous, the most thrilling and the most absorbing story of which I ever knew.
EMERSON HOUGH
Washington
District of Columbia
United States of America
February 14, 1919.
