There remained the urgent need of an immense increase in the Government’s counter-espionage forces. It would take thousands of trained and intelligent operatives to keep watch of the German agents and German sympathizers who swarmed throughout the country. As a class, such operatives did not exist: to draft the right kind of raw material from civil life would involve delays, great personal sacrifices on the part of the men drafted, and an enormous yearly budget. Thousands of business and professional careers would be interrupted at critical stages. Most of the men who accepted the call would be risking after-the-war failure in their chosen callings. The work simply couldn’t be done that way. Then it was that the American Protective League found a way to do it. The League is a volunteer body of 250,000 patriotic Americans, organized with the approval and operating under the direction of the Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation. It cross-cuts every commercial, industrial, professional, social, and economic level in American life. Bank presidents and bell hops, judges and janitors, managers and mechanics--all ranks meet on its common platform of loyalty and service. It has woven a net of discreet surveillance across more than a thousand American cities and towns; and the meshes are so small that few active German agents slip through. It reaches out into the country as well. More than 52,000,000 people--about half the population of the United States--live in communities where the League has active and effective organizations; where too, propaganda, or sedition, sabotage or plain slacking are neither popular nor healthy.