Lamar, fortified with Rintelen’s money, launched his scheme in Washington. This scheme was an inspiration of genius. Able lawyers have declared that no cleverer conspiracy has ever come to their attention. Its beauty was its simplicity. Rintelen dealt with no one but Lamar--the other leaders never saw him, and most of them never heard of him until after the scheme was exposed by the Government. In his turn, Lamar operated entirely through Martin. To Martin he gave his instructions to see labour leaders, to organize the fake Peace Council, to hold its camouflage “convention,” to flood the country with lecturers and printed matter urging an embargo on munitions. And through Martin he paid the bills. Lamar and Martin were old associates. They had worked together in the Anti-Trust League, another of the creations of Lamar’s restless mind. The Anti-Trust League originated in the feverish ’nineties, when the country had its fears that the growth of great corporations spelled the control of the Government by monopolies. The League had its days of prominence when it was financed by big interests that used it to fight other big interests to get the things they both wanted. But in 1915 the League was a skeleton, consisting of Lamar, Martin, Schulteis, and a few others, held together by the bond of small salaries drawn from some source that preferred to remain unknown. When Martin undertook to organize Labour’s National Peace Council, under the direction of Lamar, the first man he approached was Frank Buchanan. Buchanan was labour’s leading champion on the floor of Congress. He had been president of the international union of the structural iron workers, and he had earned the confidence of organized labour, and the friendship of Samuel Gompers, the patriarch of organized labour. Lamar, Buchanan, and Martin, assisted by Fowler and Schulteis, engineered a mass meeting of workingmen in Chicago in June, 1915, at which resolutions were adopted calling for a convention of labourers and farmers at Washington to protest against the traffic in munitions. The same men, with this “mandate” behind them, met in Washington on June 22d, and organized Labour’s National Peace Council. They prepared printed appeals, in the high language of humanitarianism, addressed to the labour unions and the granges, and mailed them by the ton to all parts of the country. They offered to pay all travelling expenses and for lost time to delegates which these bodies should send to a convention to be held in Washington on July 31st and August 1st.