ing treasonable or seditious matter, but also to penalize papers reprinting articles from publications declared unmailable. The Postmaster-General thus outlined how he planned to administer the act which gave him so much power over the press:
This legislation is not to prevent criticism of the Government or the Administration or the Post-Office Department. It is not aimed against Socialist publications or any other kind of publications as a class. The newspapers can denounce the Postmaster-General or the Administra- tion all they like, and they can have such criticism circulated through the mails. But if we find newspapers preaching disloyalty, newspapers that are really German at heart and in secret sympathy with the Ger- man Government which we are fighting, newspapers which are trying to make the masses in this country believe that this is a capitalists' war and that the Government therefore ought not to be supported those publications we intend to suppress with a firm hand, because we are at war with the Imperial German Government. The country has declared war. Any one who deliberately sets afoot a propaganda to discourage support to the Government as against its enemies is doing a treasonable thing. We must win the war, and we cannot brook disloy- alty at home.
EXPOSURE OF GERMAN INTRIGUE
In exposing German intrigue The Journal of Providence led all other American newspapers and lived up to its reputation for enterprise established way back in the Revolutionary Period. During the first year, the exposures of The Journal were accepted by the press with natural reluctance, but so many of them became verified that newspapers, not merely in the United States,but also in England, France, and Italy, regularly reprinted the sensational disclosures of The Journal. A fitting tribute to that newspaper was thus given in The Evening Transcript of Boston:—
The Providence Journal is entitled to the thanks of the country for the remarkable success of the inquiries into the German spy system and the German propaganda in this country which it has conducted. The Journal's discoveries have been the basis for about three-quar- ters possibly a larger proportion than that of the Government's proceedings against the German plotters; the scalps of Boy-Ed and Von Papen hang at its tepee door; and it was upon The Journal's in-
formation that most of the judicial proceedings now pending were
