Yet America, during the first year of war, has been singularly peaceful. No serious disturbance has hampered war preparations conducted on a gigantic scale. Even the Selective Service Act, inconsistent with all our volunteer traditions and pride, was accepted almost without opposition. Instead of a red reign of conflagration and civil strife, there have been no outbreaks worthy of the name; and, according to the Underwriters’ Association, not a single fire in our munitions plants of a clearly established incendiary character. Attorney-General Thomas W. Gregory, in fact, had solid grounds for declaring to the executive committee of the American Bar Association recently: “I do not believe that there is to-day any country which is being more capably policed than is the United States.” _He added that for every man engaged in detecting and investigating violations of federal laws in April, 1917, there are at least one thousand to-day_; while reports on new cases are coming in at the rate of fifteen hundred a day! That sounds like a miracle of organization, doesn’t it? Even the army, with its pride-compelling record of expansion, is a slow coach beside these legions of “plain-clothes” soldiers who hold our inner lines. Let’s see how it happened. When the war broke, the only secret service work done by the Government was handled by five small organizations. The Department of Justice had its Bureau of Investigation, charged with the discovery of offenses against the federal statutes--not a large force, but quite adequate to its peace-time job. The Treasury Department maintained a secret service with two definite functions--to protect the President’s life and person, and to prevent counterfeiting. The Army and Navy had each a few officers detailed to its intelligence service--the gathering of military and naval information and the protection of our own plans and operations. And finally the State Department possessed a small intelligence section of its own. But by comparison with the territory to be covered and the number of active German and Austrian agents in the country, there were few experienced men available for counter-espionage. And there in the background were that million and a half enemy aliens who would bear a lot of watching. The declaration of war, then, instantly brought an emergency. Part of it the Department of Justice met by striking swift and hard at all who were unquestionably enemy agents. Because of their propaganda and other activities against the Entente Allies, these agents had been under observation for some time. Within forty-eight hours the more dangerous had been rounded up--under the hoary old act of 1798, which gave the President power to intern enemy aliens when their being at liberty might constitute a menace to the public safety.