After A. P. L. began to reach out into a wide development by reason of the hard work of the National Directors at Washington, D. J. in that town began to cry for more. It sent out to all its special agents and local offices a circular explaining the great assistance which the League was capable of rendering the Government, and asked the assignment of a special agent as an A. P. L. detail in each bureau locality. This circular went out on February 6, 1918, and Boston received a copy duly, as well as the request of the Provost Marshal General to the Governor of Massachusetts for aid in selective service matters. At that time there was no division of A. P. L. organized in Boston. A few days later the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety, which had been organized and active ever since the beginning of the war, was asked to interest itself to the extent of having some good man start a Boston division of A. P. L. The latter matter was slow in development because of the extent and thoroughness of the earlier state organization. The latter had been taking care of the food, fuel and other administrative work in assistance to the Government. The feeling was that it might be better to enlarge the Committee of Public Safety than to start any new body which might be a source of misunderstanding and friction. The Department of Justice work in Boston during the early days of the war had not been satisfactory. Boston, so far from being all Puritan, has in reality one of the most mixed populations in the country. There was some feeling against the Department of Justice in Boston, and some feeling also against any new body which proposed to link up closely with that arm of the Government. D. J. had been handling for itself the alien enemy, anti-military and propaganda work. Yet very early in the game D. J. was overworked in Boston, as it had been in every other great city in America, and it really needed help. There were a great many thinking men who believed that it could be much relieved by the well-organized support of the banking, real estate, industrial and commercial activities of the city, as had been the case all over the United States where A. P. L. divisions had been created. Still another embarrassment, however, slowed up the early activities of A. P. L. in Boston. That city having in its population many French Canadians, Irish, and so forth, of the Catholic faith, had developed a sort of Church problem, and there had become somewhat active the organization known as the “A. P. A.”—whose initials are somewhat close to those of A. P. L. Many thought that confusion between the two organizations would result. There had been, moreover, in this state of independent thought, a great many other “Leagues” of this, that and the other sort; so that many felt that Boston had about enough leagues as matters then stood.