It was at the very beginning that the greatest difficulties had to be met, and it was during these early troubled days of the League that its history became inseparably linked with that of the Chicago bureau of the Department of Justice. Set down in a seething center of alien activity—for so we may justly call Chicago in the early days of this war—with only a handful of men to rely on, with no laws, no precedents, no support, no help, no past like to the present, and no future that could be predicated on anything that had gone before, Mr. Clabaugh’s bureau was the first to get swamped with the neutrality cases—and the first to be offered counsel, friendship, support, help, money, men and methods, all in quality and amount fitted to win the day for him at once. The Clabaugh story, therefore, is the most important one told by any bureau chief, and it is historically indispensable. It is all very well to have confidence in our government and to believe in a general way that it cannot err and cannot fail, but government in peace and government in war times are two distinct and separate propositions. The sheer truth is that there was absolutely no arm or branch of our government which was prepared for war. In part, we never did get prepared for it, so far as essential equipment of a military sort is concerned. In artillery, in aeroplanes, in various sorts of munitions and of equipment, we were not ready for war when the Armistice was signed. We had no adequate military or intelligence system, and the splendid force built up as M. I. D. was built after the war was begun and not before. In the same way—although, of course, we had the American faith and respect for our courts, believing them to be in some way supernal institutions which could not err and which needed no attention on the part of the people—our judiciary also was unprepared for war. It never would have been prepared for war—never in the world—had it not been for the American Protective League. It is certainly a most curious, almost an uncanny story, how the Minute Men of America once more saved the day, responding instantly to a great national need, not knowing overmuch of this new game, but each resolved to fight—each, if you please, resolving in unheroic and undramatic way—in much the same frame of mind of those men at Verdun who wrote on the page of martial history the clarion phrase, “They shall not pass!”