If New York harbor in 1914 had presented the aspect of the same harbor of twenty years before, I could hardly estimate the confusion which would have resulted from the coming of war. But there is probably no port in the world which handles New York’s volume of shipping with greater orderliness--I speak now from the standpoint of “law and order” rather than of the terminal facilities of the port. Its waterfront was physically clean and its longshore population, thanks to a competent police force, manageable. And yet, as Shakespeare said, “there are land rats and water rats--” From August, when war was declared and the Bomb Squad formed, through the fall of the year 1914, certain changes came over the waterfront. Great German liners of the Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd Lines, freighters of the Atlas Line, and a miscellany of other vessels flying the red-white-and-black lay idle in port when England’s fleet blockaded the seaward channels. Some eighty German vessels were tied up at their piers. They dared not move, for Germany’s only available convoys were in southern waters trying to dodge the British and prey upon shipping. The Hamburg-American Line and Captain Boy-Ed made several abortive attempts to supply the raiders, but the considerable merchant fleet caught in port by the war stayed in port. This dumped on the longshore population some thousands of ardent Boches. Meanwhile the great steamship lines owned by neutral and allied capital entered on a period of activity such as they had never seen before. The first ships from abroad brought purchasing agents and European money to barter for American supplies, for immediate delivery. Any man who owned anything that bore a speaking likeness to a cargo-boat suddenly found himself potentially wealthy. The whole United States began to pour into the New York waterfront a huge volume of supplies for the Allies--and for a time for Germany, via neutral Holland and Scandinavia--and out of the Hudson and East rivers flowed a steady, swelling current of this overseas trade.