Page:The web (1919).djvu/32

 What saves a country in its need? Its loyal men. What reinforces an army called on for sudden enlargement? Its volunteers. What saved San Francisco in its days of riot and anarchy in 1850? Its Volunteers for law and order. What brought peace to Alder Gulch in 1863 when criminals ruled? Its Volunteers for law and order. America always has had Volunteers to fight for law and order against criminals. The law itself says you may arrest without warrant a man caught committing a felony. The line between formal written law and natural law is but thin at best.

There was, therefore, in the spring of 1917 in America, the greatest menace to our country we ever had known. Organized criminals were in a thousand ways attacking our institutions, jeopardizing the safety, the very continuity of our country. No loyal American was safe. We did not know who were the disloyal Americans. We faced an army of masked men. They outnumbered us. We had no machinery of defense adequate to fight them, because we foolishly had thought that all these whom we had welcomed and fed were honest in their protestations—''and their oaths''—when they came to us.

So now, we say, an imperious cry of NEED came, wrung from astounded and anguished America. It was as though this actual cry came from the heavens, "I need you, my children! Help me, my children!"

That cry was heard. How, it is of small importance to any member of the American Protective League, whose wireless antennæ, for the time attuned, caught down that silent wireless from the skies. No one man sent that message. Almost, we might say, no one man answered it, so many flocked in after the first word of answer. No one man of the two hundred and fifty thousand who first and last answered in one way or another would say or would want to say that he alone made so large an answer to so large a call. None the less, we deal here with actual history. So that now we may begin with details, begin to show how those first strands were woven which in a few weeks or months had grown into one of America's strongest cables of anchorage against the terror which was abroad upon the sea.