Germany expected confidently that her well organized and richly provided spy service, her extensive propaganda and her hold upon business would enable her to undermine and palsy America’s war effort. But all her careful preparations and the huge sums of money she expended profited her scarcely at all. The great majority of American citizens of German blood or birth proved to be loyal to the United States. The swift hand of justice at once grasped and put under guard so many of Germany’s agents that the rest were unwilling to run the risk of continued activity. Over 6,000 enemy aliens were arrested under warrants and 4,000 were interned in army detention camps for the period of the war. Systematic disloyal propaganda failed so completely to produce its desired results, was everywhere so frowned upon and was so likely to be fraught with danger for those behind it that it dwindled rapidly. By the end of our first year of war pro-German and anti-American propagandists had realized the futility of their attempts. Notwithstanding all the preparations and efforts of the enemy to breed disloyalty and create disorder and lawlessness and our own lack at first of legal machinery with which to meet the situation, Germany’s underground operations were squarely met and wholly defeated and the country was never more quiet and law-abiding than it was during all the period of the war. CHAPTER XXXV AT THE HEART OF THE NATION In the memory of those who knew it during the war Washington will ever stand out as an epitome of the titanic achievements of the country. There beat the heart of the nation and there could be felt, as nowhere else, its mighty and determined pulses. There was the source of every great activity and there, with the burning intensity of sunbeams focused through a lens, the spirit of the people was making itself manifest. The war found the capital of the United States, just as it had been for many years, quiet and leisurely, aloof from business and industry, spacious and restful and lovely. And the war transformed it with lightning speed into a busy hive of war making industry, crammed with people, humming with prodigious labors, striving mightily to achieve what seemed the impossible in a hundred different ways at the same time.