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 CHAPTER V

THE LAW AND ITS NEW TEETH

Insufficiency of the Espionage Laws at the Outbreak of the War—Getting Results—The Amended Espionage Act—The Law of 1798 Revived—Statement of the Attorney General of the United States.

If predisposed to alien enemy sympathy, a critic might declare that the League was made up of individual buccaneers, who did high-handed things and escaped punishment therefor only because of the general confusion due to a state of war. Nothing could be more unjust or farther from the truth than such a belief. On the contrary, the League and the Department of Justice as well felt continually held back and hampered by respect for laws admittedly inadequate.

We had matured a great system of jurisprudence, sufficient for ordinary needs. Moreover, when war began, we had passed more laws adjusted to the new needs; but it is a curious fact that, threatened as we were by Germany's perfected system of espionage and propaganda, we had no actual statute by which we adequately could cope with it until May, 1918—more than a year after we went to war, and less than six months before the end of the war.

In the spring of 1918, the National Directors began, under the editorship of Daniel V. Casey, the issue of a League organ or confidential bulletin, called "The Spy Glass." The first number of the publication, in June of that year, took up the amended Espionage Act, which was the base of practically all of the A. P. L. and D. J. work during the war. This amendment rebuilt and stiffened the original Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, which had been found insufficient, and "put teeth in the law," as the Attorney General's office phrased it. "The Spy Glass" printed a digest of the new enactment, which is of essential interest at this point of the League's story as it determined the whole character of the