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 CHAPTER 1

THE STORY OF THE EAST

In deplorably skeletonized fashion, we have offered a brief story of the League's growth, its purposes and its methods, and the stories of some of its great centers. But how about the country-wide achievements of the League, its field story? How can it be told? It is matter of regret that in no possible way can that ever be put within the compass of book publication. The records of these millions of cases, as has been said, runs into tons.

If you should visit the division offices, for instance, of New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, or any other large A. P. L. center, you would see in each city a room full of filing cabinets, with indexed drawers, carrying in permanent form the story of the League's work in that given locality. Mass all these from the hundreds of cities engaged in the work, and you would have a pile of filing cabinets as high as a tall building. Go to the National Headquarters and you would find more rooms full of cabinets, covering the national work—an enormous total, painstaking, exact, correct. Go over to the Military Intelligence and you see more of the League's work there. Go to the Department of Justice and look at the vast accumulations there at hand from the reports of this auxiliary.

Now, in imagination, pile all this uncomprehended assemblage of records into the middle of some park or square and have a glance at it in mass. In that mountain-pile of written and printed material, thousands of brains have recorded their soberest and most just conclusions, and have told why they concluded thus or thus. Thousands of stenographers have worked long days and nights on these tons of millions of pages. Be sure, in this mass of a nation's story in counter-*espionage, there is to be found, ticketed and tabulated, filed and cross-indexed under name and number, as part of the archives of the United States, the life and actions, the birth,