Out in a great city on Puget Sound, the Minute Men Division of the American Protective League, after an exhaustive investigation covering several months, arrested a certain man whom we will call Johnson. He was charged with conspiracy to doctor steel and iron in the Seattle ship-yards with a powerful chemical, intending to commit wholesale murder by wrecking troop trains. He was a pattern-maker employed in a ship-building plant when the Federal officials arrested him as an alleged German spy. At the time of his arrest, he had in his pocket a bottle containing a violent explosive. His scheme was to apply a strong acid to steel and iron in the shipyards, which would destroy these metals by eating them away. He planned to place acid on iron about to be melted, so that the resulting steel products would be valueless and the ship-building program delayed. He was charged with undertaking to damage the more delicate bearings of the ships, so that they would be useless after putting out to sea. It was part of his scheme, as developed by the operatives, to place acids in the journal boxes of cars, with the intent of destroying them while they were under way. The A. P. L. operatives claimed to be conspirators with him. When one of them pointed out that such a wreck would cost a large amount of life, the accused is said to have replied: “Well, what’s the odds how we kill them, and what’s the difference whether we kill them over here or over there?” That man, like many now behind bars, had no moral sense at all. Not all of these agents of Germany were men of the mental shrewdness of their great spy leaders. Johnson picked out a fellow worker and felt him out for a long period of time as to whether he would be safe as a confidant. This particular fellow happened to look like a German, and to talk like one. He also happened to be an A. P. L. operative. The accused, who is charged under the Espionage Act, does not yet know the identity of the man who informed against him.