The trial lasted for five months. The preparation for it covered two years or more. The record is said to be the most elaborate and complete ever prepared in any case at law. The case was by no means a Chicago or Illinois case, but was a national and indeed an international one. The documentary and other evidence preserved in the rooms of the Bureau of Investigation in Chicago is so voluminous as to pass belief, and it includes more proof of the depravity of the human mind than any like assemblage of written and printed material known to man. It is the record of the attempted ruin of this republic. With this great case, the American Protective League had been connected practically all the time from the date of its own inception. It had men shadowing the suspects, men intercepting their mail, men ingratiating themselves into their good graces, men watching all their comings and goings, men transcribing and indexing the reports, men looking into the law in all its phases as bearing on these cases. No one knows how many A. P. L. operatives, in all the states from Michigan westward, worked on this case for months before an arrest was made. There were fifteen lawyers, all of them members of the League, not one of whom got a cent of pay, who worked for a full year helping the Bureau of Investigation to brief the evidence. There you see the A. P. L. in action. For months and years before the arrests, the Industrial Workers of the World, as they call themselves, had been notorious for their anarchy and violence. Countless acts of ruthlessness had marked their career; millions and perhaps billions in property had been destroyed by them; their leader had been tried for the murder of a governor of a Western state, though acquitted. Nothing lacked in their record of lawlessness and terror, and they were inspired by a Hun-like frightfulness as well as a Hun-like cunning which for a time both excited and baffled the agents of the law in a dozen Western States.