Those defendants who remained had not been allowed at large on bail, thanks to the vigilance of Preston. Yet in spite of all precautions, the proceedings frequently threatened to get out of control. The United States had been at war for a year; the Federal Court was trying both alien enemies of military status and alien enemies who had engaged in and stood convicted of conspiracy, as well as conspirators against the rule of Britain in India who had revolution quite definitely in mind. Great Britain, for six months before the trial began, had been our ally and, in spirit at least, a traitor to Great Britain was a traitor to the United States. In spirit, but not in the letter of the law: the worst punishment which any existing statutes could impose on any single defendant found wholly and completely guilty of the charge was _two years' imprisonment and a fine of $10,000_. For such conviction, and for such punishment of the United States' military enemies, the prosecution clambered about through the tangle of civil procedure; we had been six months at war and laws had not been supplied to facilitate the swift justice due such enemies, nor have laws been supplied as this is written. More than eighty "court days" were consumed, the shorthand reporting alone cost more than $35,000. A court commissioner released four important witnesses "for want of evidence." (One of them was indicted in New York and the commissioner was himself dismissed.) Gupta, arrested in New York, was released on bail and swiftly fled across the Mexican border to continue his propaganda. Trying as the case was to all who were concerned in it, expeditiously as it was handled by the authorities, and informative as it proved to be, it was monumental in its confession that civil courts cannot act with the warning vigor and speed made necessary by war conditions. The evidence introduced pointed clearly to the conclusion that the German-Hindu plot, complex as it is to us as critics, was unfruitful even to Berlin. Perhaps its very breadth made it awkward to manage. Nearly four years of war passed, and there was no mutiny in India. The stewards of the Indian domain knew anxious moments, but they found some solace in the realization that half way around the world, in the United States, there was a pair of eyes to watch every pair of mischievous hands, and that the conspiracy directed against the Orient could not take effect while those eyes were open. It requires no special gift of prophecy to predict that secret conspiracies will continue unless those eyes are more vigilant than ever. The United States Attorney announced as the conspirators were being sentenced that he felt that the court might well instruct their dark associates to "cut out their propaganda," and that their _Gahdr_ presses were even then turning out "barrels and bales of seditious literature." To this Judge Van Fleet gravely responded: