The story of the mysterious flotilla spread quickly through a city whose lack of newspapers made its apprehensive curiosity only the more keen. Robbed of its news and bulletin service, the people, without any conscious plan, had organized a news service of their own. They had fallen back on the primitive method of circulating information from man to man. _New York’s “Bush Telegraph”_ Within twenty-four hours of the suppression of the liberty of its press, the highly modern, highly artificial city had in operation the same form of news-transmission that has so often puzzled and even awed travelers in savage lands. Under the sky-scrapers the “bush telegraph” carried its messages with almost the same astonishing swiftness as in the jungle. It was done by hasty whispers and by furtive conversation, for among the Orders and Regulations that were promulgated daily there was a little warning that severe punishment would be inflicted on any person who “spread false news, communicated the movement of land and sea forces, made noises or uttered outcries of a nature to disturb troops, or inspected, sketched, photographed or made descriptions of views on land or sea without authority.”[156] There were enough ominous elasticity and inclusiveness in this Order to cover almost any exchange of words. Yet men, even though they were mortally afraid while they did it, could not resist the human impulse to transmit anything that they learned. The news merely puzzled the great mass of the population. Accustomed all their lives to turn to their newspapers for knowledge about everything, they were quite helpless with their one means of enlightenment shut off. _To Open the Harbor_ The Citizens’ Committee and the city officials, however, were able to guess pretty clearly what this movement of troops and heavy artillery meant. There was nothing in the lower harbor that possibly could demand such force except one place--the forts on Sandy Hook, the last remaining harbor defense that still was under the American flag. Solitary though it was, so long as it remained intact it forbade the entrance of New York Harbor to any hostile vessel. There had been wonder before because the enemy commander had not demanded the surrender of the Sandy Hook defenses under threat of bombarding the city, as he had demanded and forced the surrender of Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth. “Because Sandy Hook is not within the city, as the other two forts were,” was the solution at which the city’s lawyers arrived, after considering the rules governing military action. “The invader plainly is adhering carefully to all the accepted Rules of War. By doing so, he can, and does, hold us to account rigorously under the same Rules. This is profitable to him, for despite all their apparent stipulations in favor of a conquered territory, the Rules of War are made, after all, to facilitate war.”