It was a master stroke! There were at least a million aliens, trained soldiers of Northern and Central Europe, living in the United States. A single master mind could direct this army as one man. He thanked God that his father and the girls were at Babylon. He had sent them there to avoid the scenes of the Peace Jubilee. He was too cautious now to play into the hands of the enemy. He made his way to a telephone booth and attempted to call the Mayor’s house. There was no answer from Central. The telephone system was out of commission. He hurried to a Western Union office to wire Washington. Every key was silent and the operators were standing in terror-stricken groups discussing the meaning of it all. He hurried to the Times Building to try and reach the President by wireless and found the plant a wreck. It was ten o’clock next day before the extent of the night’s horror was known to little groups of leading men who had been lucky enough to escape arrest by the Imperial garrison. Vassar stood among his friends in the dim back room of Schultz’s store pale and determined, speaking in subdued tone. Scrap by scrap the appalling situation had been revealed. A federation of crowned heads of Northern and Central Europe had decided in caucus that the United States of America was the one fly in the ointment of world harmony. They determined to remove it at once, and extend the system of government by divine right not only into South America but North America as well. The great war had impoverished their treasuries. The money had flowed into the vaults of the despised common herd of the United States. They would first indemnify themselves for the losses of the world war out of this exhaustless hoard and then organize the social and industrial chaos of the West into the imperial efficiency of a real civilization. The result would make them the masters of the Western World for all time. Their system once organized would be invincible. The slaves they had rescued from anarchy would kiss the hand of their conquerors at last. This was the whispered message a trusted leader had received from an officer half drunk with wine and crazed by the victory they had already achieved for the approaching imperial fleet. Their business was to arrest and hold as hostages every man of wealth in New York, guard the vaults and banks to prevent the removal of money, garrison and control the cities until the fleet had landed the imperial army. The completeness with which the uprising of royalist subjects had been executed was appalling. They had taken the trunk lines of every railroad in America. Not a train had arrived in New York from any point south of Newark, New Jersey, and no train from the north had reached the city beyond Tarrytown on the Hudson or South Norwalk on the New York, New Haven and Hartford.