Page:The web (1919).djvu/102

 was a concrete pier in the port of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, with a concealed base suitable for heavy gun mounts. That pier now belongs to the United States Government. Before the war it was the property of a steamship company organized by wealthy Germans, of whom Emperor William was one. Its office was in the headquarters of the German spies in New York. After the United States went to war, the pier was sold to a Dane to cover the ownership. The Dane could not meet his note when it came due, and Mr. Palmer confiscated the pier immediately as German property.

Mr. Palmer stated, long before the Overman Committee began its testimony, that Germany, years before she started this war, had undertaken to plant on American soil a great industrial and commercial army. She believed she could keep America out of the conflict, for she had her organization in every state of the Union. It reached across the Pacific to Hawaii and the Philippines and up to Alaska; in the Atlantic it was found in Porto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Panama. Industry after industry was built up, totaling probably two billion dollars in money value, and billions more in potential political value.

"Germany had spies in the German-owned industries of Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York and the West," says Mr. Palmer. "She fought the war when we were neutral on American soil by agents sent here for that purpose."

St. Andrew's Bay, not far from Pensacola, Florida, is a very fine harbor, the nearest American harbor, indeed, to the Panama canal. Mr. Palmer shows that this was wholly controlled by Germans, who were organized in the form of a lumber company and who had purchased thousands of acres of timber nearby. The wealthy owner of the German property never saw it. A concealed fort had been constructed there, and right of way on the shore had been purchased. Not even the Government of the United States could have obtained a terminal on St. Andrew's Bay unless it did business with the owner in Berlin. Such being the case, Custodian Palmer did not buy it at all—he simply took it in and added it to his list of more than two billion dollars' worth of German-owned property taken over since the war began.