A hundred or more of their subordinates have been convicted of various criminal offenses and sent to prison. Still more were promptly interned in prison camps at the outbreak of war in 1917. The secret army included all types, from bankers to longshoremen. Many of them were conspicuous figures in American public life, and of these no small part were allowed to remain at large under certain restrictions--and under surveillance. Germany's army in the United States was powerful in numbers; the fact that so many agents were working destruction probably hastened their discovery; the loyalty of many so-called German-Americans was always questionable. The public mind, confused as it had never been before by the news of war, was groping about for sound fundamentals, and was being tantalized with false principles by the politicians. Meanwhile Count von Bernstorff was watching Congress and the President, Dr. Albert was busy in great schemes, Captain von Papen was commanding an active army of spies, and Captain Boy-Ed was engaged in a bitter fight with the British navy. CHAPTER II THE CONSPIRATORS' TASK The terrain--Lower New York--The consulates--The economic problem of supplying Germany and checking supplies to the Allies--The diplomatic problem of keeping America's friendship--The military problem in Canada, Mexico, India, etc.--Germany's denial. The playwright selects from the affairs of a group of people a few characters and incidents, and works them together into a three-hour plot. He may include no matter which is not relevant to the development of his story, and although in the hands of the artist the play seems to pierce clearly into the characters of the persons involved, in reality he is constructing a framework, whose angles are only the more prominent salients of character and episode. The stage limits him, whether his story takes place in the kitchen or on the battlefield. The drama of German spy operations in America is of baffling proportions. Its curtain rose long before the war; its early episodes were grave enough to have caused, any one of them, a nine-days' wonder in the press, its climax was rather a huge accumulation of intolerable disasters than a single outstanding incident, and its dénouement continued long after America's declaration of war. In the previous chapter we have accepted our limitations and introduced only the four chief characters of the play. It is necessary, in describing the motives for their enterprises, to appreciate the problems which their scene of operations presented.