Just because it was improvised and its personnel kept secret, the League could meet the most dangerous German agents on their own ground and paralyze their efforts by keeping them guessing. Propaganda dies on the lips of the man who can’t be certain that his listener is not making mental notes for an official report of the conversation. And the most subtle scheme of spying or sabotage is bound to drag when the plot master is harassed by doubts of the native-born or naturalized accomplices he must enlist for its execution. One instance to show how much a local organization must depend upon its specialists. Last summer it became necessary to know beyond question whether or not a prominent young German-American in a seaboard city was supplying the funds for the local agitation against the draft. Suspicion attached to him because he spent many evenings aboard his fast-racing schooner in the yacht club harbour, and could not be induced, in any polite and casual way, to invite any of the League’s yachting members aboard. His crew, two Scandinavians, were as voluble as oysters. The schooner was being tuned up for the annual club cruise late in July. Two extra sailors would be needed for the race. The League provided one of them. An upstanding young American, too young for the first officers’ training camp but in line for the second, was taken into the League, carefully coached, and turned loose in the harbour with a loaned cat-boat to impress the German-American skipper with his sailing skill. The boy finessed his approach successfully and was asked to train with the crew. But he found nothing material to report until the schooner had actually won the big race. That night after the victory had been celebrated in a flood of champagne, which he alone avoided, he quietly went through all the private papers in the owner’s cabin, made notes, or copied all that referred in any way to pro-German activities and returned by rail to the home port next morning. It turned out that the owner had been guilty of no real disloyalty, though he had skirted the edge more than once; but his papers pointed straight to the real source of the propaganda and the latter was speedily apprehended.