I am sorry that our laws were not at that time drastic enough to punish the men as they deserved. James W. Osborne, the assistant United States Attorney who tried the case, wove an admirable prosecution, and Judge Harland B. Howe turned a stern face upon the prisoners. Wolpert had been haled from Atlanta to answer to the new charge, as had von Kleist and Becker. The engineers were brought out of their internment camps. And last, and foremost of all, Franz Rintelen was there--returned to us by the British to answer to a series of charges which he had tried hard and expensively to conceal. The best our laws of the moment could do for these men who had defiled our hospitality and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of property on our soil was to sentence them to one-and-one-half years in Atlanta. It is to the everlasting credit of Judge Howe that Rintelen, Wolpert, von Kleist, Becker, Praedel, Paradies and Garbade received the maximum prison term, and the maximum fine of $2,000 each. Under the espionage act later adopted each of them could be sentenced to twenty years and fined $10,000. Popular consent would have made short work of these men’s lives. Justice had to preside over their trials, however, and they were punished to the full extent of an inadequate law. A more drastic criminal code would probably have frightened the German spies in the United States, and it is equally true that German agents who were caught in the net of the law laughed up their sleeves as they made use of one after another of the law’s technical provisions and privileges to avert what would have been certain and swift death had they worn the field-gray uniforms of their nation. They have not suffered in proportion to their crimes. But their nation is paying the price. [Illustration: Norman H. White, of Boston, a civilian attached to the Military Intelligence, who unearthed numerous German intrigues]