The function of the League in all these matters is obvious. No case at law will "stick" unless supported by competent testimony. We have seen that the League was organized for the collection of evidence, and for nothing else. Limited as its power was, it really saved the day for our hard-pressed country. It increased our Army by many thousands of evaders whom it found and turned over to the military authorities. It put hundreds of aliens into internment. It apprehended plotters and prevented consummation of conspiracies beyond number. It kept down the danger of that large disloyal element, and held Germany in America safe while we went on with the open business of war in the field. It is by no means too much to say that much of the Kaiser's disappointment over his German-American revolt was due not so much to any loyalty to the American flag—for of all of our racial representatives, the Germans are the most clannishly and tenaciously loyal to their own former flag—as it was to fear of the silent and stern hand searching out in the dark and taking first one and then another German or pro-German away from the scenes that erstwhile had known him. It was fear that held our enemy population down—fear and nothing else. It was the League's silent and mysterious errand to pile up good reason for that fear.
At the crack of war, certain hundreds of dangerous aliens were interned at once. They simply vanished, that was all, behind the walls of camps or of prisons. It will be mistaken mercy if we shall not deport thousands more when we shall have the time deliberately to do that. Fear is the one thing such men understand. Honor and loyalty, terms interdependent and inseparable, are unknown to them. Too many Germans loved America only because they made money easily here. Their real flag still was across the sea, except as they had raised it here in their churches and their schools.
It was sometimes rumored that many spies were shot secretly in America. That would have been done in Germany—as witness the deaths of Edith Cavell and others. It was not done here. We did not kill a single spy, a single traitor,—more is the pity. By reason of the fact that we had outspied Germany's vaunted espionage, we nipped in the bud none knows how many plots and conspiracies which otherwise would have matured in ruin to life and property.
