Frederick the GreatThe founder of modern organised espionage
Frederick the GreatThe founder of modern organised espionage
Frederick the Great
The founder of modern organised espionage
"War is a business in which the slightest scruple is detrimental to one's arms and policies. It may be said that no sovereign can seriously enter into the business of war, if he feels he has not the right to justify pillage, incendiarism and carnage," a declaration which allows us to assume that at leastoneHohenzollern heart would never have bled for the fate of Louvain, or Arras, or Rheims, in 1914.
Continuing to voice his opinions on religion, the King is made to say: "Whatever we may think inwardly, impiety is never to be displayed at any time, although we must adapt our sentiments and opinions to our rank and standing in the world. It would be the height of folly, if a monarch's attention was diverted by trifles of religion which are fit only for the common people. Besides, the most complete indifference for religious matters is the best means which a King can hold to prevent his subjects from becoming fanatics. My ancestors acted in a most sensible manner in dealing with religion, undertaking a religious Reformation which, while it gave them a glorious apostolic halo, at the same time filled their treasuries with money. The Hohenzollerns began by being pagans, of course, but becameChristians in the ninth century in order to please the Emperors; in the fifteenth century they became Lutherans in order to have an excuse to rob the Church, and Reformers again in the sixteenth, in order to placate the Dutch over the succession of Cleves."
In regard to Justice, Frederick declared that justice is due to the subjects of a State, although it is especially necessary that rulers should not be brought so far within the scope of justice that they become themselves subject to it. "I am too ambitious and autocratic by nature to suffer willingly the existence of another order within my States which should restrict my action. It was for this reason that I drew up a new code of laws. I am fully aware that I did away with the real spirit of justice, but the truth was, I had become rather afraid of the influence such notions exert among the common people. A King must not allow himself to be dazzled by the word Justice: it is only a relative term, and one which is susceptible of application and explanation in different ways. Everyone likes to be just in his own fashion, and as I early realised this, I decided to undermine the foundations of that great power Justice. And so it has only been by simplifying it as much as possible that I have been able to reduce it to the point where I wanted it to be—that is, to a minimum. I could never have accomplished anything had I been restrained by legal ideals. I might have passed for a just monarch, but I should never have won the title of a hero."
Of the value of a set policy in the world and as the only means of achieving any success, Frederick had very decided notions: "As it has been agreed among men that to cheat our fellow-creatures is a base and criminal act, it has been necessary to find a word which should modify the conception, and accordingly the termpolicywas adopted. By the word policy, I mean that we must always try to dupe other people. This is the only sure means of getting, not necessarily an advantage, but a fair chance of remaining on an equal footing. I am, therefore, not ashamed of making alliances from which only myself can derive entire advantage; but I am never so foolish as not to break faith when my interests require it, since I uphold the rectitude of the maxim that to despoil one's neighbours is to deprive them of the means of injuring one. Statesmanship can be reduced to three principles or maxims: the first is to maintain your power and, according to circumstances, to increase and extend it, just as I doubled my army on reaching the throne for the sole purposes of conquest. Make sure of your army; have plenty of money and bide a favourable time; you can then be certain, not only of preserving your States, but of adding to them. The term 'balance of power' is one which has subjugated the whole world; in reality, however, it is nothing but a mere phrase. Europe is a family in which there are too many bad brothers and relatives, and it is only by despising the whole system that vast projects can be formed. Thesecond principle is to make your allies serve you, and to throw them off when they have ceased to be useful. The third principle is to make yourself feared—this is the height of great statesmanship. All your neighbours must be led to believe that you are a dangerous monarch who is moved by no principle except martial glory. If they are convinced that you would rather lose two kingdoms than not occupy a prominent place in history, you are certain to succeed. Above all, let no one within your kingdom write anything except to extol your actions and efforts."
Given a political philosophy of this kind as the inspiration of the Prussian idea—"Kultur," they call it—it is not hard to realise that the essentially evil qualities of the government of Prussia were certain ultimately to react upon the character of the people themselves. If anyone should doubt the correctness of our view that non-constitutional systems of government invariably require the support of vicious subsidiary systems in order to assure their stability, as in the militaristic regime of Napoleon, or the quasi-ecclesiastical rule of Richelieu, a study of Prussian autocracy will soon put him in the way of settled conviction. Since the day of Frederick, some one hundred and twenty-eight years ago, the people of Prussia have only known such liberty as is consistent with a bureaucracy the underlying conditions of which are conceived on entirely military ideas—that is to say, the type of individual freedom which we are accustomed to associate with a feudalisticregime or rule by martial law. People who travelled much on the Continent before the outbreak of the Great War may recollect how on crossing the frontier of Belgium into Germany—at Herbesthal, if we remember—one invariably seemed to experience much the same sensation as that of exchanging the atmosphere of some warm and comfortable sitting-room for the cold and formal conditions of a public office. Once across the border, the military spirit seemed to predominate everywhere, while among the friendly enough natives of the unofficial classes there was a subdued not to say cowed demeanour which was in saddening contrast with the free-and-easy cheeriness of the people just left behind. Everywhere was there evidence of set discipline and on all hands the spectre of officialism appeared to darken the daily lives of men with some sort of unexpressed threat. Even fair and open dealings seemed among the townsmen to be undertaken with the consciousness that at any moment some furtive official might come upon the scene and utter the irrevocableverboten—forbidden. Later in the noisy gaieties of the beer-garden or music-hall, one ever seemed to note that fear of the boisterous schoolboy who under the watchful eye of a forbidding master never ceases even in the fullness of his frolic to wonder just how far he is allowed to go. "Germany," says the admirable Price Collier, "has shown us that the short-cut to the government of a people by suppression and strangulation results in a dreary developmentof mediocrity." In our opinion the American might have added that a nation which is ruled as if it were a country of convicts, actual or potential, cannot fail inevitably to develop in a pronounced degree those symptoms of character and predisposition which land your convict in the correctional institutions where he is most commonly to be found. "Prussia and Germany," again says Collier, "are still ruled socially and politically by a small group of, roughly, fifty thousand men, eight thousand of them in the frock-coat of the civilian official and the rest in military uniforms."
It is the fashion to say that Doctor Stieber was the organiser of the modern spy system of Germany, for the conduct of which some million pounds sterling are annually appropriated. The truth is, however, that the organisation goes much farther back, a well-known statesman of the Napoleonic period, Baron Stein, having been responsible for the practical application of the theories which lie implicit in the philosophy of Frederick the Great. In his turn, Stieber assumed control of the lines and developed them to a point at which improvement became almost impossible. Stieber was a typical adventurer of the middle class, a man who, it is clear enough, had in him all those elements of character which we associate with the criminal who operates along the higher lines. It is said that he qualified as a barrister, not so much with the object of practising law, as to discover its limitations, or in other words, toknow for a certainty how far scheming and the exploitation of simpler natures can be made a lawful trade. He was born in Prussia in 1818, and having been called to the Prussian Bar, sought to apply his knowledge of legal matters as a kind of counsellor in a Silesian factory, Silesia being in those days, 1847, the nursery of that vast school of Socialism which has since gained over twenty millions of adherents throughout Germany—indeed, one-third of the empire's entire population. By far the larger percentage of the workmen attached to the factory at which he was employed were Socialists, and Stieber realised that if he could only penetrate the secrets and methods of this important socialistic nucleus, he might prove undoubtedly serviceable to the central government in Berlin. Accordingly he joined the Socialist brotherhood, professing to be entirely in sympathy with their aims and aspirations, and in a short while became an acknowledged leader of the Silesian movement. As a man of superior education, Stieber gained admittance to the family of the firm which employed him, won the heart of his employer's daughter and married her.
It is certain that by 1848 he was already in touch with officials at the chief police bureau in Berlin, and traitor that he was, in order further to ingratiate himself with the Berlin authorities, Stieber persuaded his wife's uncle to enter into the Socialistic movement, the new recruit compromising himself so deeply by the violence of his radical opinions and utterances that, withStieber's complicity, he was denounced, arrested and imprisoned on the ground that he was inciting the Silesians to revolt against the government. To have been a Socialist about 1850 was, it may be said, as bad as to have been an Anarchist in the last years of the nineteenth century, when that movement was at its height. The arrest of a relative through Stieber's instrumentality was accordingly a real earnest of his good disposition towards existing authority, and it was readily realised that in this recruit there was all the baseness and treachery which Berlin looked for in its officials. Stieber was summoned to Berlin, where he was given a commission in the secret police, with the duty of allying himself to the Socialist movement and reporting as to its progress, designs and machinations to headquarters in Berlin. Parenthetically, it may be observed, the German wordstieberis equivalent to our own term sleuth-hound, so that the spy was happy in his patronymic as well as mentally adapted for his traitorous trade. A writer has described him in the following terms:—"Herr Stieber is a man whose head, nose and ears suggest a Hebrew strain, although it is known that his father was a Gentile. There is in the general aspect of the face, and especially in the drawn lines of the mouth, much of that self-justifying hardness which is associated with the ideas given us of the Inquisition Fathers; his eyes are almost white in their colourlessness. With subordinates he adopts the loud airs of a master towards hisslaves, and when in the presence of high authorities he is self-abasing and quiet of voice, wearing a smile of perennial oiliness and acquiescence, with much rubbing of the hands, a Jewish characteristic."
His work in Silesia was so ably performed and so many arrests and imprisonments followed as the result of his services, that the Berlin authorities decided to employ their sleuth in the capital, where already the Socialists were becoming an important enough body. Armed with letters of introduction from his committees in Silesia, Stieber arrived in Berlin and forthwith became a member of the principal revolutionary clubs in the metropolis. The spy himself describes his presentation to King Frederick William: "My duties required me as a Socialist leader to head a procession of revolutionaries through the capital. At a point in the progress of our bands, the King appeared on the scene, and naturally felt but little at his ease, seeing that the Socialists were the avowed enemies of all existing forms of government and their representatives. Noting his trepidation, I approached his majesty near enough to say: 'Sire, have no fear. I am of your majesty's side and have taken every precaution for your safety. In the meanwhile I must proceed with my rôle of leading these poor deluded people.'" Notwithstanding that Stieber from this day became an object of suspicion to men of the Socialist clubs who had known him in Silesia, the influence of the King protected him and eventually took himinto the monarch's service with the title of "police-counsellor," a position which allowed him virtually to act on his own initiative and independently of the minister of police. Stieber's real business in his new post was to keep a close watch upon the ministerial or official police, and that he did so with particular satisfaction to the Prussian monarch, the latter one day admitted to the official chief of police who was complaining of the officious activities and energies of the police-counsellor, and suggested his removal on the ground that since the man was a traitor to those with whom he professed to adhere, he must necessarily be suspect in any cause in which he engaged. The King replied:
"Stieber is more devoted to his King than to any cause and I reward him well. He used to come to me from time to time and tell me what the Socialists were doing, what their plans and intentions were and how on one occasion they had debated the question of seizing the royal family and establishing a Commune."
The minister of police was accordingly forced to realise that Stieber had for several years been engaged in the double game of working for the secret service as an agent and at the same time of spying upon them at the instance of the King. A few days later he was appointed by his royal patron chief of the Prussian secret service with a salary of £1200 per annum. In his new capacity, as the confidential man of the sovereign and the head of a system which operated almost as muchagainst the official police as against revolutionary bodies, the spy had not only to organise the nucleus of that army corps of espionage which by 1912 was said to number 45,000 active agents, but had also to fight strong and influential enemies who saw with dismay the promotion of this unknown intruder. In order to effect the complete independence of his own body from all others which exercised kindred functions, Stieber suggested the entire modernisation and specialisation of his service with proper subsidies and adequate appropriations from parliament, the department to enjoy autonomy under its presiding chief. He undertook himself to organise an "internal" and an "external" service, and here it may be said that the Russian dual system of espionage has been based entirely on Stieber's ideas and, in so far, differs not at all from the secret service of Prussia, except possibly in that the almost entire absence of ideas of personal liberty renders illegal acts and outrages far more frequent in Russia than in Germany. It was Stieber also who inaugurated the well-established system of court-spying which is known to exist at all the German capitals; he was responsible for the corps of spies within government offices who spy upon departmental bureaux, while a highly efficient body of clerks who were employed in banking and commercial houses and all institutions which possessed large internal and foreign relations were also paid in proportion to tit-bits of information which they were able to place at the disposal of his cabinet.To the King—clearly a worthy descendant of FrederickII.—Stieber, by virtue of his office, had free access and presented a daily report in person in which all and everything of any import concerning the public and private life of men and women was made known to the sovereign. On one occasion the King jokingly reproved his spy, saying: "You give me all the information I require regarding the private lives of my courtiers; but what about my brothers? They are certainly not angels."
"Your Majesty had not authorised me to spy upon the Princes," replied Stieber, "but in the meantime I had prepared myself against the possibilities of your Majesty doing so. Here are three sealed documents containing all there is to be known about their Royal Highnesses since I have had the honour of serving."
By 1854 the chief agent had become a personage in Berlin, and although the nobility of the higher rank would not receive him, Stieber found many valuable acquaintances among the wealthy "climbers" of the capital who were eager to be associated with the powerful chief confidant of the King. When the special-service department was in full running, Stieber was given orders to apply its methods to foreign countries and accordingly by 1860 Austria, Bohemia, Saxony, Luxembourg and France were under the observation of his employees. In 1855 the Reichstag voted an appropriation of about £15,000 in order to "secure for the State the benefits of useful intelligence,"the secret-service agent himself drawing some £1800 yearly from the fund. At this time, says a writer of the period, Stieber was the most prominent official in the kingdom. All were conscious of being closely watched by himself and his agents and everyone was aware that ruin and dismissal could be brought about at the nod of the chief, and accordingly Stieber effected the entrance of himself and his wife into some of the best houses in Berlin under veiled threats of disclosing secrets of moment unless his advances were respectfully received. About this time, too, Stieber began that collection of decorations which were to testify to the high honour and esteem in which his King and country held him. He had no proper military uniform and that which on official occasions he was wont to wear resembled not a little the quasi-regimental garb of the commissionaire. By 1860 it had become heavily covered with medals and decorations.
Stieber's activities had enabled him to learn so much as to the inner workings of the whole political and social fabric of Prussia and the Germanic nations that an attempt to abolish the private police system, undertaken by the Reichstag in 1855, had no practical result, although Stieber disappeared for a short while from official life in that year. It was certain, however, that the very extent of his private information had made him a man who was no less dangerous than important and who, in any case, was an individual who had to be calculated with. Bismarck, analready-established figure in national politics, was the first to realise this in 1864, when he was president of the council of ministers and when Stieber was reinstated in active public life. In the previous couple of years he had occupied his comparative leisure by organising the Russian secret police, by discovering the manœuvres and designs of a certain Frenchintrigantewhose services were being used by diplomats, the Tsar conferring on him the order of Stanislaus and making him a large grant of money. Bismarck was well aware of the splendid services Stieber had rendered to Russia and it was with a view to making use of the chief's universal information that he attached him to the foreign office as a secret-mission agent, with instructions to proceed into Bohemia. It was already Bismarck's intention to strike down Austria, even as he had struck down Denmark in 1864 and as again he was to strike down France in 1870. Stieber's mission was to prepare the invasion of Bohemia by supplying Bismarck with all kinds of topographical information which must prove of the first importance to German military commanders. It was information which could only be acquired by a most minute inspection of the various military routes available into Austria, and Stieber felt that this could best be accomplished by disguising himself as a pedlar. His stock-in-trade consisted of religious statues and indecent pictures. During 1864, 1865 and 1866, the supposed pedlar, travelling with a small wagon, mapped out in the completest detail thecountry through which the Prussian armies marched in the last-named year to the victory of Sadowa by which Austria finally surrendered any possible claim she may still have entertained to hold the headship of the Germanic States in Europe. Even Moltke, the Prussian organiser of victory, was astonished at the vast amount of valuable military information by which the spy had facilitated the rapid advance of his armies. "A man with a genius for military combinations could not have done better for his own purposes," declared the old Field-Marshal to Bismarck. King William, too, while occupying Brunn as his headquarters after Sadowa, requested the ex-pedlar to administer the town, explaining to both Bismarck and the commander-in-chief his reasons in the following words:—
"One must not confine oneself to giving money to spies. One must also know how to show them honour when they deserve it."
Stieber was Governor of Brunn, the capital of Moravia, for several months, a position which Napoleon had also allowed his spy Schulmeister to hold at several towns in his time. It has to be remembered, however, that in both cases the spies were in districts about which they were far better acquainted than any members of the military or politicalpersonnels. Expediency also counted for something in each appointment. At the close of the war he was appointed a Prussian privy-councillor and minister of the national police. Asked afterwards how much he had expended onhis network of strategic spies and traitors who practically sold Austria to Prussia in 1866, Stieber replied:
"One cannot set down in dollars the value of bloodshed which has been avoided, nor of victories which have been secured."
That Stieber was admitted to the more intimate confidences of Bismarck would seem indicated by the fact that in the year after Sadowa, the chief of police suggested, he tells in his Memoirs, that he should be entrusted with the task of doing in France what he had done in Bohemia. This was in June 1867, when he asked Bismarck for eighteen months' time in which to supply the Chancellor with all the military and regional intelligence of the French frontiers and invasion zones, which it was necessary to possess for a successful campaign. Prussia was then paying some £52,000 a year for the secret-intelligence service, and Bismarck was not slow to perceive that Stieber in his own way was making the path of victory more smooth for von Moltke's commanders. In the month of June the Chancellor had induced King William to confer on his police-minister the order of the Red Eagle, and in the course of the evening which followed the conferring of that decoration Bismarck and Stieber were for long engaged in conversation, the momentous nature of which was soon shown by the departure of Stieber, accompanied by his aides, Zernicki and Kaltenbach, into France withthe object of laying down base-lines, as the surveyors put it. Among the various results of that journey was the appointment of over 1000 spies within the invasion zones with "head-centres" at Brussels, Lausanne and Geneva. Another result of this journey, he himself tells, was his handing over to Bismarck some 1650 reports of fixed local spies, in the pay of Prussia, 90 per cent. of them Prussians, which called for (a) the drafting of large bodies of German agriculturists into districts which lay along the possible routes of advancing German armies, and (b) the sending of several thousands of female employees for service in public places as barmaids or cashiers. It was emphasised that these women should be "as pretty as possible." Several hundred retired non-commissioned officers were to be sent to France, where local "fixed spies" guaranteed them employment of a commercial kind. Furthermore in the garrison towns in the eastern departments some fifty young and pretty girls to act as servants in canteens were requisitioned by Stieber, who laid stress on the fact that women of a "high type of morality" would hardly serve his purpose, which was to extract information from drinking soldiers. Several hundred more domestic servants were to be placed among the homes of middle-class people such as doctors, lawyers, merchants. From the year 1867, and in pursuance of Stieber's plans, some 13,000 German spies of the minor order were asked for, itself a sufficiently large body of immigrants,one would imagine, to awaken the suspicions of alert French people. Between that year and 1870, Stieber had added at least 20,000 more, all of them scattered in various kinds of capacities along the routes of intended invasion from Berlin and Belgium to Paris. There was one important interlude, however.
In 1867 an attempt was made on the life of AlexanderII.of Russia by a Pole, when that Emperor was paying an important political visit to NapoleonIII.Stieber was then in Paris with Bismarck, also attached to the staff of the King of Prussia, who was a participator in this meeting of sovereigns. Information had come to the Prussian minister of police that an attempt was to be made on the life of Alexander. Accordingly Stieber called on Bismarck, imparting to him this important information. Bismarck assured his police-minister that he was already acquainted with the plot to assassinate the Tsar.
"But," added the Chancellor, "we must allow this act to be attempted and for political reasons. Nevertheless, we can assure the safety of the Emperor by having the conspirators shadowed and arrested once they have fired their revolvers. You, Stieber, must have your men on the spot, and when the attempt is made, the assailant's aim must be deflected. The very fact that an attack is made upon the Tsar while in Paris will prevent the arranging of a Franco-Russian alliance which is not just now to the interests of Prussia, and if the would-be assassin is not condemned todeath, a period of estrangement must follow between France and Russia and this is just as I would have things to be."
As it fell out, a young Pole actually made the attempt on the next day. Stieber's men had shadowed him all through the night, till the very moment in which he fired at the Tsar, the outrage taking place, but without harmful results to the object of the attack. All had fallen out as Bismarck had foretold, and with the subsequent failure of a Paris jury to convict the youthful Pole, France was prevented, by the estrangement which succeeded, from assuring herself the friendship of an ally whose support might have changed the history of the Franco-German War of 1870. The story is told in detail in Stieber's own Memoirs, and we confess that, having read it several times with care, we are ourselves forced to the conclusion that Bismarck's supposition that a French jury would fail to convict the Pole was based upon something much more tangible than the arts and processes of divination. In other words, the impression left upon the mind is that Bismarck's gold had subsidised the conspirators in the plot as well as the Paris jurymen, in order to bring about a political situation which should not interfere with his plans. Bismarck had already more than once proved himself an expert in preparing his schemes far in advance, as the Danish and Austrian wars had already proved, and as the Franco-German War was even more fully to demonstrate.
When, in due course, and as a result of Bismarck's plan of forcing a fight on the French at the psychological moment, war was declared against France in July 1870, Stieber and his two lieutenants, Zernicki and Kaltenbach, left for the Front with the headquarters staff. His title was Chief of the Active-Service Police and his duties, drawn up by himself, were as follows:—
1. To provide information to the Staff regarding the situation, strength and movements of each of the French armies in the field.
2. To provide all possible details with regard to the age, the disposition and character and the personal and military reputation of each commander, his possible successor in the command and other superior officers. In respect of this provision, it is interesting to learn that part of the report regarding the late General de Gallifet, the cavalry leader and hero of Sedan, was given in approximately the following terms:—"This officer is one who under Napoleon the First would have held the highest rank. A real Frenchman, with his heart in the war and a hater of all things Prussian. A fighter for the initiative, by every instinct, a dangerous adversary and, for us, better dead. Should be watched; has no thought for anything in the present war but the success of the French arms."
3. Reports as to the political dispositions and temper of all districts for twenty miles ahead of the advancing Prussian armies, as well asthe capacity of each district for supplying the commissariat.
4. To have available at every point of importance traversed by our armies several persons of intelligence who can give directions as to routes, sources of supplies and so forth. In other words, the purchase of traitors.
5. To arrange that suitable persons shall be in residence at each important point who are willing to accommodate such persons as the Staff may designate.
When questioned by von Roon as to the likelihood of his being able to facilitate their armies' progress by supplying commanders with so much information, Stieber boastfully replied: "All this information is not only ready; it is already printed. Remember, my army has been entrenched in France for nearly two years." It was also at this time that Stieber informed von Roon thathisarmy counted nearly 40,000 persons of both sexes—an army corps, almost. In the first three months of the campaign the chief of police held a position which was as much a puzzle to German generals themselves as to departmental officials connected with the army. Stieber, when Bismarck and the King of Prussia were not present, exercised a power which no general durst override, since his own department was officially independent and in war-time the existence of martial law added to his summary powers. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear that the boastful sleuth displayed a ferocity ofdisposition to the conquered populations which one always suspects to be part of his base and treacherous character. As an exponent of the arts of terrorism, he must have regaled the heart of the bloodiest of Hohenzollerns. Children, old men and invalids were flogged, spread-eagle fashion, and in the presence of their parents and relatives, with the object of forcing the elders of municipalities to reveal information. Women and girls were violated in the same interests, while summary executions became the order of the police-minister's passing. "Oppose me," he would cry to cowering mayors and magistrates who begged mercy for their townsmen, "and I will hang a hundred of your people." The successful mongrel was clearly in his element in those days; nor did he omit any opportunity of adding to his collection of orders and medals with all of which he was accustomed to adorn his breast on every possible and impossible occasion. Not at all a welcome guest at mess-tables, the spy was nevertheless invited on more than one occasion to dine with Bismarck and his staff. We may easily suppose that the diplomatic corps gave the man the cold shoulder at all times. An official at one of these field banquets having just observed that the German army was invincible, Stieber, on his own record, jumped up brusquely and declared that the speaker should have said that the Germanarmieswere invincible. "My army," continued the braggart, "has already preceded your army by six months." Bismarck,who had noted throughout the evening the many slights put upon the spy, thereupon rose from his seat and passed round to Stieber's, when "without a word, but looking straight into my eyes, he held out to me his left hand wide open, which I clasped tightly in both of mine," to quote the Memoirs.
What Bismarck was wont to term "action on the Press" was undertaken also by Stieber during the course of the war of 1870. For this purpose the sleuth had in 1868 requested Bismarck for an appropriation of £15,000 annually, in return for which he promised the Chancellor to make many of the important provincial and other French papers "talk Prussian," as he put it. In a large measure he may be said to have contributed to the modern importance which has grown up around the Press, and by 1870 he declared that he could control the opinions of some eighty-five writers in the French daily and weekly newspapers. He had divided his corps of writers intohomeandforeignbodies. Writers, for example, who were able to influence the insertion of articles favourable to Prussia and Prussian policies were paid several times the amount which they commonly received for their articles through the ordinary channels of remuneration. These foreign writers were not confined to France, but were active also in Austria, Italy and England. Well-known bankers, business men and the heads of news agencies—many of them German Hebrews—were the instruments through whom Stieber worked.Most of these individuals were able, through acquaintanceship with professional leader-writers and journalists, to procure the insertion into articles of views held by the Prussian Government; such gentry were themselves receiving Prussian Orders and decorations, while their particular private scribes were rewarded in cash. It was by means of Germans occupying high positions in the public life of European countries that in 1864 the world was prepared intellectually for the partition of Denmark, in 1866 for the war with Austria and thenceforth for the federation of the Germanic States under the ægis of Prussia. It must not be imagined that this propaganda ceased with Prussia's attainment of the headship of the Teutonic Bond. Indeed, it may be said only to have been inaugurated with its early successes under Bismarck, whose control of a venal Press in Vienna, Rome and even London was hardly less effective in its day than that which he exploited and subsidised all over Germany. By 1870 Stieber had, he himself tells, assured himself of a Press in Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux, which kept the Prussian view openly and permanently before the inhabitants of those important cities.
There is anaïvetéabout Stieber's autobiography which recalls Le Caron. During a memorable evening spent in the company of Bismarck, "the most beautiful of my life," says the spy, conversation turned upon the question of opportunity as the condition of success in life. The Chancellorsought to point the moral of his philosophy in the matter by the following words:—"Just consider, Stieber," he said, "how far and high destiny has led a tramp like yourself who was hated by everybody." That conversation, writes the spy, may become historic; and he rejoices to think of the good fortune which has enabled him to serve Bismarck, "assuredly the greatest of modern men." Again, he is frankness itself when he declares that his aide-de-camp Zernicki represented the elements of courtesy and kindliness, while he himself had no thought for anything but action and results and certainly no time to expend upon formalities. In all his remarks upon his records and successes we inevitably get the true note of the upstart who has achieved the power of making other men fear him. Thus, at Versailles, the police agent, for some minor offence, threatened to "hang ten members of the municipal committee as sure as my name is Stieber," and wrote to his wife recording the fact with much self-glory and glee. His part in the execution of a young gentleman, Monsieur de Raynal, was especially characteristic. This resident of Versailles, who had just recently returned from his honeymoon, had been in the habit of keeping a diary recording the daily occurrences of the German occupation. Stieber could easily have settled the matter with a reprimand. "No," he said, "I must have an example. M. de Raynal is a young man who writes very interesting matter. I am sorry forhim, but he will have to face the rifles. If he escapes, I will allow him to go free." When told that the young man had just recently been married, he replied with mock feeling, "That makes my duty all the more painful," and Raynal was accordingly shot. In truth the Prussian sleuth was an ideal type of the official who would "hang the guiltless rather than eat his mutton cold," and though there is no statistical record of the number of lives which he sacrificed in the interests of his policy of terrorism, there can be no doubt that it could only have been expressed in terms of scores.
On his arrival with the headquarters staff and the King of Prussia at Versailles in September 1870, Stieber took up his lodgings at an important hotel belonging to the Duc de Persigny and here he also housed his corps of active-service agents, numbering altogether 120. It is hard to credit the statement, but the authority, M. Paul Lanoir, declares that the police-minister was successful in enlisting the services of some 10,000 persons in Versailles who, in consideration of the payment of one franc daily, agreed to "acclaim with cheers and hurrahs the Prussian monarch and princes whenever they made their excursions into the neighbourhood." Another first-class authority, M. Victor Tissot, seems by his remarks to disprove the statement of Renan to the effect that it is well-nigh impossible to find a traitor among Frenchmen. Tissot assures us that Stieber's work in France was much facilitated by the factthat the Prussian secret service was paying large salaries to important men in French public life, in return for information supplied. The same Paul Lanoir whom we have quoted above also states that Prussian gold has been active in French political life up till within quite recent times. He has met and still knows men, he says, who entered politics without a decent coat to their names who have become as if by magic possessed of splendid mansions, and whose wives, formerly milliners or washerwomen, have now taken to giving receptions on a lavish scale. These politicians would seem to be political only to the extent that they represent a purely personal policy of their own, for, says Lanoir, they continue to "champion the cause of the people," the assumption being that they are paidagents provocateursin the service of Germany whose duty it is to keep the Republic in a state of such unrest that it must fall an easy prey to an attack from outside. M. Lanoir's statements apply, it is only right to add, to that period of grave unrest in France which succeeded upon the Church crisis and the Moroccan difficulties, and which may be said to have closed by 1911.
It is necessary unfortunately to follow this man Stieber to the close of his career and for the reason that the modern system of espionage in Germany, in regard to both its home and foreign relations, is based wholly on the methods which he laid down after the Franco-German War of 1870. He returned to Berlin a more important man thanever, with several more decorations to add to his already heavily bestarred chest. At this period he possessed a house in the neighbourhood of the Hallesches Thor and was credited with the possession of about 1,000,000 marks or £50,000 sterling. His womenfolk proved a source of some anxiety to him in a social sense, and not even the patronage of the omnipotent Chancellor von Bismarck could induce the exclusive classes of Berlin to look upon them with favour. Prussian vulgarity possesses a brand entirely its own, and the House of Stieber appeared to be afflicted with all its worst symptoms, including the inability to realise that position, even supported by wealth, which owed its existence to a talent for exploiting the basest characteristics of human nature, must ever, except among the most servile and venal, remain isolated and practically ostracised during at least the life of its founders. We are therefore not surprised to learn that in order to maintain some outward semblance of an important rôle in society for his family, Stieber was forced to resort to a kind of blackmail, in which he threatened persons of high social worth, who consistently refused to meet his relatives, with the revelation of domestic secrets of the most intimate nature. In this way, he effected some progress, though it is also well known that he became instrumental in driving several notable personages permanently back to their country estates. Stieber himself made no secret of his philosophy in such matters. "To hold a certain power over men who are mysuperiors, is the sweetest power I have known, and accounts in many ways for my success," is a remark attributed to the sleuth. Like many another well-knownnouveau richeof modern days, whose rise to vast wealth has served only to emphasise an elemental ineptitude for the wielding of public power, Stieber feared the Theatre as a potential flagellant of his ignoble self, and to this end exercised, through subsidiary agents, a veritable censorship upon the German drama. In order to provide against this possibility of seeing himself burlesqued upon the stage by some rising Molière, he was at great pains to procure the position of censors for members of his personal acquaintance, and even in the literary world his secret influence was always at work. His ambition to possess the "particle of nobility,"von, the old Emperor William firmly withstood, nor could the Chancellor move his master to include Stieber in any list promoting the sleuth to Adelstand, as the Germans term the condition of noble rank.
It was perhaps with some remorseful consciousness of the sorry tenor of his whole career that Stieber, about 1875, decided to exercise his talents in a more important branch of high politics than had been possible up to that time. Perhaps, too, it was with his pathetic quest of a patent of nobility in view that the sleuth thought out a plan for the consolidation of imperial Germany, which in his opinion must recommend itself to his omnipotent friend Bismarck. We do not, ofcourse, rely implicitly on all he says in his Memoirs; but there is little doubt that his intimacy with the Chancellor was of the closest kind and that Bismarck encouraged his police-minister's counsels to every possible furtherance of imperial plans. It used credibly to be said that Stieber, who was, of course, a man of good education, especially sought out the historian Mommsen with a view to discussing with that luminary something about the secret of Rome's predominance in the world and of her hold upon her conquests. No records remain of any such conversations if they ever really took place, but we may be sure that if they did take place, Stieber was put in full possession of those principles of "dividing in order to govern"; of the strategic value of roads; of the garrisoning of subject countries by the troops of races mutually antipathetic; of the value of blood-letting in political combinations, to quote a memorable phrase of Napoleon. In any case by the year 1880, Stieber had presented a memorial to Prince Bismarck the political effects arising from which have been seen down to the most recent times and have mainly contributed to the costly militarism of the past generation. The railway systems of Germany were to be developed in the main with regard to their strategic military values, a consideration which had only been partly realised in the earlier construction of lines. In the second place, large appropriations for German Secret Service funds were annually to be set aside with the object of buying, or placing, traitors in everygreat country in Europe with which the German Empire, in accordance with its plan of dominating the Western World, was likely ever to come into conflict. As will be seen later, no country in Europe became exempt from the operations of German emissaries whether as spies or else as the agents of domestic unrest and revolution and all to the end that the newurbs sacra, Berlin, should be to the modern world all that Rome was to that of antiquity. It is not difficult therefore to understand that the secret-service fund sanctioned by the Reichstag had grown from £52,000 in 1867 to the sum of £800,000 in 1910.
The German railway system radiates from Berlin, not according to the concessional plans of other countries, but in accordance with the definite warlike designs and conceptions of the military authorities whose ulterior aim is a confederation of all European States governed from Berlin. Thus, the great network of railways is divided into military divisions, the most familiar of which to us are Berlin, Magdeburg, Hanover and Cologne, the first of the strategic lines of attack which is directed like a pistol at the French frontier and which co-operates with parallel systems with depôts at Coblentz and Elberfeld. Along these lines German military authorities profess to be able to transport, within twenty-four hours of the order to mobilise, a number not far short of 1,000,000 men, together with full equipment, commissariat and war material. At the head of each of the railway divisions is a military officer whose functions are much similar to those of a general commanding an army; under him is a staff of officers, non-commissioned officers and men who in reality "run" the system and are responsible for its working in regard to freights, passenger transportation and time-schedules. And sincethe railway systems are designed primarily for military purposes—as were the old Roman roads—little if any consideration has been paid in their construction to commercial or industrial requirements. In every respect the systems are regarded as, first of all, the means of military transportation, and accordingly, wherever any portion or portions of a given line may appear to be exposed to hostile attack, principles of ordinary fortification are adopted. The depôts are mainly built with commissarial objects in view. The personnel of the systems, guards, ticket collectors, engine-drivers, are all military in every sense (including the worst) of that term, as no one who has ever travelled over the German-Belgian boundaries at Herbesthal and met the dictatorial German railway guard for the first time will require to be told. Along these lines, which radiate from Berlin to the French frontier, it has been laid down as one of the most stringent of official German regulations that:
"No native of Alsace or Lorraine, even if performing his military service in Germany, shall, under any circumstances whatever, be recruited or admitted in any capacity, no matter how minor, for employment on German divisional railroads."
On the other hand Stieber had seen to it that as many hundreds of Alsatians and Lorrainers who were willing to enter his service should be employed by the French railway systems at the other side of the Frontier assoi-disantFrenchmen. In accordance with their engagement to serveStieber, they were paid at the rate of twenty-five per cent. of the wages they were drawing from their French employers, and until 1884 there were at least 1500 of them so serving both the French system and the German espionage bureau. In 1884 the French Government was roused to a realisation of the peril of allowing these men to work on their railroads, and they were rapidly removed. It is on record that in 1880 Stieber had promised the old Emperor William that on the day on which Germany should again mobilise her armies, he himself could guarantee for the railways of France over 1000 trusted agents who were prepared, by destroying locomotives and other railroad stock, to paralyse the French mobilisation to the Frontier in such a way that German armies should have fairly approached the capital before the Republic had got her forces decisively in hand.
In regard to the second part of his programme—namely, that which was to create factions, unrest and revolutionary conditions in countries which were to become the objects of German military aggression—Stieber developed the ideas which still hold good in the plans of the German Secret Service. The main principle underlying his plan of campaign was the fomenting of industrial disorders. In each case a literary propaganda was to precede action, which was first to be undertaken by trained spies andagents provocateurswho were capable, by the common methods of political and industrial agitators, of promoting class antipathies. German enterprise in thisrespect has not been confined to France, but has been active in every country in Europe, including England. In 1893 the successor of Bismarck, Count Caprivi, signed an appropriation of £4000 for the purposes of "providing foreign pamphlets and publications useful to the policy of the Empire." In later years the sum was increased to £20,000, while a number of paid agitators, inciting the great industrial centres of France, of Belgium, of Russia and (it is recorded) of England, is said to have drawn large sums from the German funds. The recent epidemic of industrial strikes in France, Russia and England is declared to have been fomented by paid agitators working on behalf of German authorities—some of them unconsciously, and as a result of the influence exerted by publications which had been subsidised by German gold. There are French writers who still maintain that the Dreyfus agitation was initiated and supported with the connivance of the highest military authorities in Berlin for the purpose of destroying one of the most potent forces in France—namely, belief and trust in the Army. Most of us, at all events, will recollect how towards the close of the momentousAffaire, when the Republic was already weakened by the series of national and international crises attending on the entire event, ominous threats of mobilisation were more than once made from Berlin. Again, the memorable Associations Bill, which enacted the disestablishment of the Church in France, was said to have owed its conception toGerman secret-service agents. To this movement—bound in any case to awaken the cupidity of venal politicians, in view of the vast Congregational possessions involved—succeeded the era of Syndicalist unrest, and finally the outbreak of the war of 1914. Nor can Englishmen forget that the so-called Agadir incident of the spring of 1911 coincided with one of the most devastating strikes Britain has yet known. In view of what we now know, there can hardly be a doubt that German plans and policies had meditated the paralysing of our transport system and our coal-supplies. Nor is there, again, the least possible doubt that for many years past German "philosophers," drawing pay from the secret-service funds, have been instructing British as well as French and Russian workmen in the art of combining "in defence of their rights" against the privileged classes. In Germany such revolutionary doctrines never leave the theoretical stage, nor could they do so, given the system of government which is in principle and practice hardly different from martial law. Most people who have been resident for any time in Germany will, in this regard, recollect an old piece of advice which friendly elders are accustomed to give their juniors—namely, that in the Fatherland every good citizen is required to "pay taxes, build barracks and shut his mouth." When one considers this pearl of civic wisdom in conjunction with the unwritten law which requires that even the public portraits of all royal and princelypersonages shall be criticised favourably, or not at all, one is bound to admit that anything like Anglo-Saxon liberty of opinion or outspokenness is still far removed from the ordinary life of your German of to-day.
In order to indicate the operation of the German secret service in regard to the spreading of revolutionary unrest among neighbouring countries, we cannot do better than cite the publication which was addressed to Ireland, the supposedly "revolted province," in the early days of August 1914. Here are the terms of that historic manifesto which moved all Ireland to mirth for many a day: