As to the total volume of the League’s work, it never will be known, and no figures will ever cover it more than partially. It handled in less than two years, for the War Department alone, over three million cases. It spent millions of dollars. It had a quarter million silent and resolute men on its rolls. These men were the best of their communities. They did not work for pay. They worked for duty, and worked harder than a like number in any army of the world. Some of the things they did, some of the astonishing matters they uncovered, some of the strange stories they unearthed, will be taken up in order in the pages following, and in a way more specifically informing than has hitherto been attempted. The League totals are tremendous, but the trouble with totals is that they do not enter into comprehension. A million dollars means little as a phrase, if left barren of some yard-stick for comparative measurement. Thus, when we say that long ago the number of suspect cases investigated by the American Protective League had passed the three-million mark, we hail the figures as grandiose, but have no personal idea of what they mean, no accurate conception of the multitude, the nature and the multiplicity in detail of the three million separate and distinct cases. It is when we begin to go into details as to the work and its organization from unit to block, from operative to chief, that we begin to open our eyes. The government of this country had had thrown on it all at once a burden a thousand times as great as that of times of peace. We had to raise men and money, munitions, food, fuel for ourselves and all the world. We were not prepared. We had to learn all at once the one and hardest thing—one which America never yet had learned—economy. We had to do all the active and positive material things necessary to put an Army in the field across seas—build ships, fabricate ordnance, arm large bodies of men, train them, feed them, get their fighting morale on edge. Yes, all these things—but this was only part. Our negative defense, our silent forces also had to be developed. We had to learn economy—and suspicion. That last was hard to learn. Just as delay and breakdowns happened in other branches of the suddenly overloaded government, so a breakdown in the resources of the Department of Justice—least known but most valuable portion of our nation’s governmental system—was a thing imminent. That was because of the swift multiplication of the list of entirely new things that had to be looked into with justice, and yet with speed. It is not too much to say that without the inspired idea of the American Protective League, its Web spread out behind the lines, there could not long have been said in the full confidence of to-day, “God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives.”