"Among its other operations was the execution of a plot concocted by General Babcock and District-Attorney Harrington to blacken the reputation of Mr Columbus Alexander who had made himself obnoxious to the ring. A certain detective one day informed Mr Alexander that he could obtain and deliver to him the private account-book of a contractor which would show the entire rascality going on. These books had already been delivered by the contractor to District Attorney Harrington who locked them up in his safe. The next night two professional burglars were hired to enter the office, blow open the safe and carry the books to Mr Alexander's house. That day Harrington had informed the police that he feared a burglary was about to be attempted and the superintendent, with the whole detective force, was on hand at the appointed hour. When the burglars had performed their work, they walked boldly out at the front door of the District Attorney's office, where they were kindly received by Harrington and his friend A. B. Williams. The principal burglar, having pocketed his fee, bade his confederates good-night and walked home. His assistant, in pursuance of theagreement, started for Mr Alexander's house, followed by the detectives and representatives of the ring. He lost his way unfortunately and Williams was obliged to direct him. He rang the bell for fifteen or twenty minutes, but failed to arouse anybody. He was then arrested by the detectives and locked up. Subsequently he signed an affidavit, at the instigation of Harrington, setting forth that he had been hired by Mr Alexander to blow open the safe in the District Attorney's office and bring the contractor's books to his house."The affair was immediately investigated. Harrington and the secret-service officials involved themselves in an inextricable mass of perjury, and then the detective first employed by Harrington came forward and revealed the whole conspiracy. The feeling against the scoundrels who had thus plotted to ruin the character of an upright and honourable man was very bitter. The masks were torn from their faces and they stood revealed in their true colours. The few honest men who had been deceived by their pretences into defending their acts repudiated them utterly. This exposure of the wrong-doings of the Secret Service led to the refusal of Congress to make any appropriations for its pay, with the exception of a small force attached to the Treasury Department. The old Capitol prison was converted into dwelling-houses and nearly all the agents were scattered over the country, many of them becoming connected with private secret-service organisations.As a general rule, these fellows are inferior in intellect and ability, if not in honesty, to the professional rascals whom they occasionally arrest. They often lay traps for weak men in crimes designed for them, and find vulgar employment by those seeking divorce from matrimonial bonds. Secret Service is certainly not a necessity in a Republic in times of peace, and when their virtues and their weaknesses during the War for the suppression of the Rebellion are impartially summed up, it will be difficult to decide whether those who professedly served the Union were a blessing or a curse to it."
"Among its other operations was the execution of a plot concocted by General Babcock and District-Attorney Harrington to blacken the reputation of Mr Columbus Alexander who had made himself obnoxious to the ring. A certain detective one day informed Mr Alexander that he could obtain and deliver to him the private account-book of a contractor which would show the entire rascality going on. These books had already been delivered by the contractor to District Attorney Harrington who locked them up in his safe. The next night two professional burglars were hired to enter the office, blow open the safe and carry the books to Mr Alexander's house. That day Harrington had informed the police that he feared a burglary was about to be attempted and the superintendent, with the whole detective force, was on hand at the appointed hour. When the burglars had performed their work, they walked boldly out at the front door of the District Attorney's office, where they were kindly received by Harrington and his friend A. B. Williams. The principal burglar, having pocketed his fee, bade his confederates good-night and walked home. His assistant, in pursuance of theagreement, started for Mr Alexander's house, followed by the detectives and representatives of the ring. He lost his way unfortunately and Williams was obliged to direct him. He rang the bell for fifteen or twenty minutes, but failed to arouse anybody. He was then arrested by the detectives and locked up. Subsequently he signed an affidavit, at the instigation of Harrington, setting forth that he had been hired by Mr Alexander to blow open the safe in the District Attorney's office and bring the contractor's books to his house.
"The affair was immediately investigated. Harrington and the secret-service officials involved themselves in an inextricable mass of perjury, and then the detective first employed by Harrington came forward and revealed the whole conspiracy. The feeling against the scoundrels who had thus plotted to ruin the character of an upright and honourable man was very bitter. The masks were torn from their faces and they stood revealed in their true colours. The few honest men who had been deceived by their pretences into defending their acts repudiated them utterly. This exposure of the wrong-doings of the Secret Service led to the refusal of Congress to make any appropriations for its pay, with the exception of a small force attached to the Treasury Department. The old Capitol prison was converted into dwelling-houses and nearly all the agents were scattered over the country, many of them becoming connected with private secret-service organisations.As a general rule, these fellows are inferior in intellect and ability, if not in honesty, to the professional rascals whom they occasionally arrest. They often lay traps for weak men in crimes designed for them, and find vulgar employment by those seeking divorce from matrimonial bonds. Secret Service is certainly not a necessity in a Republic in times of peace, and when their virtues and their weaknesses during the War for the suppression of the Rebellion are impartially summed up, it will be difficult to decide whether those who professedly served the Union were a blessing or a curse to it."
The Customs House of the great City by the Hudson has its owncorps d'espionnage, the object of which is to defeat the large number of tourists returning from summer trips to Europe, who attempt the next-to-impossible feat of "beating the Customs" by smuggling heavily excisable goods. Under the Roosevelt and McKinley regimes, when high tariffs were the ruling order, even rich men and women resorted to all manner of expedients in order to defeat the excisemen in West Street landing-stages. In the year 1905 matters had come to such a pass that a definitely organised system of espionage was adopted with a view to curtailing the operations of wealthy smugglers who could well have afforded to pay the heavy duties involved. The services of stewards and stewardesses on board the liners were not only requisitioned, both men and women beinggiven pass-keys for the purpose of privately inspecting the luggage of suspected passengers, but women, apparently of wealth and standing, were also commissioned to travel to and fro between European and American ports and use all the means at their disposal to induce sister American tourists to give up, confidentially of course, a correct estimate of their purchases in Paris and London, the same information being duly transmitted to the New York Customs as soon as vessels berthed, or touched at Sandy Hook. Not only were the maids and valets of suspected smugglers suborned, but even, in London and Paris, the counter salesmen connected with fashionable outfitters and jewellers, as well as invoice clerks, were paid a fixed rate of reward for all information given to American Consular agents in Europe which might help the transatlantic port authorities to discover the delinquents and their private contraband on arrival at New York. Then there was the trick of the weighing-machine, guaranteed to take avoirdupois to the smallest fractions—plausible women spies and officious stewards and stewardesses making it their pleasure to have each saloon passenger "scaled" in order to show how beneficially sea-travel affected the health. At the Customs offices at New York these machines stood ready, in duplicate, to weigh any fair suspect who might possibly have swathed her form in contraband silks or other prohibited commodities, and a comparison with weight-lists previously supplied by obliging stewardesses was sureto decide the question as to whether or not she was to be made the object of a personal visitation by the official female searchers of the Port. In the case of one lady who was weighed off Queenstown, the indicator then recording 10 stone 6 lb., or 146 lb., duly registered by a stewardess, it was found that the duplicate machine at New York made her turn the scale at 168 lb., the result being that she was found to be carrying dutiable goods concealed on her person worth many hundreds of dollars excise tax to the authorities.
Much is told of the alleged system of newspaper spies employed by English and American "yellow" papers, which are said by the uninitiated to employ their corps of spy detectives in the same way as an established secret service employs its special agents. In America it is quite certain that since the so-called "yellows" depend to the larger extent on the providing of purely "police" news to their clients, a certain amount of espionage becomes part of the work of the daily reporter. During the course of the notorious Thaw trial, in the last decade, witnesses of all sorts—including the young wife of Thaw—were subjected to the attentions of reporters who, by following their social movements, were able to add suggestive tit-bits to the "stories" appearing daily and nightly in the papers, and much to the surprise and annoyance of their victims. As far as we know, however, nothing of the kind has yet entered into the processes of British journalism.
The authorities for the following story are these:—Correspondence of Napoleon, vol. v.;Memoirs of Bourrienne, vol. ii.;Memoirs of Prince Eugene, vol. i.;Memoirs of the Duchesse d'Abrantés, vol. iii. Except to very minute students of the Napoleonic legend, it is not very well known, nor could the episode be said to rise very much above the commonplace, were it not for the extraordinary personality of the central figure around whom the incidents play. It is simply with a view to showing the operations of what has been called "the long arm of British diplomacy" that we tell the tale of an attempt to put a term to Bonaparte's ambitions as early as 1798, when the Corsican had only reached his thirtieth year. It is customary to say that historic figures, no matter how great or spectacular their enterprises, are never—or rarely ever—so magnificent, in the classical sense, to the eyes of their contemporaries as they prove afterwards to succeeding generations. It took the battle of Austerlitz, for example, to force Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël, to say nothing of the Bourbon Princes, as well as a host of public men of note, into a full and final realisation that in the person of Napoleon an elementalforce had appeared in Europe whose activities in the world were not to stop till, to use the great soldier's own memorable phrase, Nature had ceased to require him as an instrument of its designs. And we all know the story of how the younger Pitt received the intelligence of that conflict of a December midday: "Roll up the map of Europe," he is alleged to have said, "it will not be required these ten years"—which was prophecy with almost mathematical accuracy, if we may use such a term. The truth is, however, that seven years previously, British diplomacy had already gauged the significance of the new world-portent, and by 1800 plans were already laid to fight the coming menace to the principle of the balance of power. The fact itself holds a lesson for all who fatuously imagine that the history of the world is enacted in a series of accidents and that the business of diplomatic agents consists in meeting and dealing with these accidents as they automatically appear. The work of all great foreign ministers whom the world has known has, on the contrary, consisted in providing for contingencies long foreseen and patiently awaited. What Prussia's unique foreign expert worthy of that name in the story of its whole diplomacy—Bismarck—achieved in this way as preparatory to the campaigns of 1864, 1866 and 1870, British Diplomacy is always and eternally achieving. To the process of its perennial vigils and deliberate acts we may apply the famous remark: "There it is, the great engine,it never sleeps," and as the custodian of the set principle that no single Power shall overrule the rights of other nations, men are beginning at last to realise what in reality it represents, and that not only is Great Britain now and for ages invincible and indestructible, but that in her self-charged world-rôle of defending the Right there is that which, if need were, shows the mind of watchful Providence itself.
When, in 1798, Bonaparte set out for his Egyptian campaign, there were already in active existence two redoubtable forces with which his ambition was destined to become fatefully engaged—namely, Nelson and British diplomatic vigilance. Long before his début on the Nile, British Secret Service had put all its forces in motion in order to upset his designs against England's Eastern dominions, and not one of these designs was unknown to Downing Street. Egypt then, as now, was in respect of its commercial activities almost wholly under the domination of English political and monetary influences, the result being that from the moment of his arrival at Cairo, an extraordinary web of espionage had already been woven round the Corsican. It is suggestive enough that the means which the secret agents of London proposed to employ for the undoing of the young conqueror of Italy were based mainly on the idea that Napoleon was easily susceptible to feminine influences. His quasi-public heart-affairs with Madame Colombier, Caroline Bressieux, Madame Saint-Huberti, DesiréeClary and the woman Turreau, in Paris, had misled the British Cabinet, strangely enough, with the notion that he could be destroyed through the agency of ministering angels of the venal variety. At all events, the system of espionage was conceived upon Bonaparte's supposed foible and its direction was undertaken by Sir Sidney Smith—whose interminable after-dinner tales of his exploit at St Jean d'Acre were afterwards to win him the title of "Long Acre"—assisted by John H. Barnett, a secret-service agent in British employ.
Bonaparte, it is known, had allowed but very few women to follow his army to Egypt, among these few being the wives of some of his principal generals. One of his inferior officers, a certain Fourès, just lately married, had, however, transgressed the orders of the Commander-in-Chief, to the extent of taking his bride-wife with him to Egypt dressed as a man-servant. In this disguise Madame Fourès was successful in reaching the Nile, where she assumed her regular woman's attire, took lodgings in Cairo and proceeded to lead an ordinarily domesticated life with her husband. It was not long, however, before the story of the lady's deceit came to the ears of Bonaparte through Junot, a connoisseur in feminine attractions, and the youthful General was moved by curiosity to see the rare bird that had eluded his vigilance and transgressed his rigorous orders—all the more so, perhaps, as Junot declared that this one was a veritable birdof paradise in respect of her personal charms and otherallèchements. Accordingly, he so arranged matters that in the course of a review of his army all the French ladies in Cairo should be present to witness the manœuvres of the troops. Among them came the youthful Madame Fourès, whom Junot pointed out discreetly to his General. Evidently the latter was satisfied with his cursory inspection, for he turned to his famous lieutenant, instructing him to issue invitations to a dinner on the subsequent day to which certain ladies were to be invited, including Madame Fourès, whose husband was, however, not among the invited guests. Naturally, the Captain felt slighted. He was well known to be a man of fire-eating disposition—as John Barnett, who knew him personally, could fully testify—and his first inclination was to issue a direct challenge to his superior officer, Junot, whose propensities, where pretty women loomed large, were known throughout the army to be what the late Mr Labouchere used to term patriarchal. Then, on second reflection, he urged his wife to refuse the invitation. Now Madame Fourès was just in the newly wedded stage of her personal emotions, and every man of experience is aware that a bride in that stage is more susceptible to the external symptoms of the love-passion than at any other time. Indeed, the lady had already divined from Bonaparte's ardent glance the state of his feelings towards her. And although she practically, to use an Americanism, already "saw her finish,"the truth would seem that she did not much care where she was to end. At all events, she declined to obey the Captain, twitting him with jealousy, and accepted the invitation for herself alone. It had been prearranged that Bonaparte was not to be of the invited party, but was to make his appearance during the course of the dinner, which arrangement was duly carried out, Bonaparte being presented to all the guests on his arrival.
Was it not Wellington who declared that "Bonaparte was no gentleman"? In any case, after presentation to Madame Fourès, the young General took a seat opposite to hers and began to stare the lady out of countenance, exceedingly to her embarrassment. Then quickly finishing a cup of coffee and with a curt word of adieu he passed from the room. Some moments after, Junot, whose place was beside that of Madame Fourès, in turning his chair, upset the lady's coffee into her lap. Apologising profusely for his awkwardness, the soldier, assisted by General Dupuy, sought to remedy the disaster with the aid of sponges and serviettes, only to find that the stain began to travel all over the skirt and was, for that day at least, irremovable. General Dupuy affected to be on the verge of tears. "Junot," said he, "perhaps it would be better to allow Madame Fourès to arrange her dress in some adjoining room." And Junot led the Captain's wife to an adjoining room, in which was—Bonaparte.
At this juncture our mind travels back, anachronistically enough, perhaps, to the late Artemus Ward, his "morril bares and wax figgers," and we feel inclined to ask the honourable printer to "put sum stars here." We prefer, however, to fall back on the profound observation of a French historian who deals with this episode. He says: "Madame Fourès entered that adjoining room with a blot upon her dress which was bad enough. It was nothing, however, to the blot upon her character when she came out." The lady was, it appears, wholly complacent, and as the presence of her husband was now a matter of embarrassment both to herself and Bonaparte, the latter took immediate steps to assure the return of Captain Fourès to France—ostensibly as the bearer of sealed orders to the Directory.
"My dear Fourès," said Berthier to him in accordance with this decision, "you are luckier than the rest of us, for you are going to see France once more. The Commander-in-Chief has decided to entrust you with a mission of the highest importance, knowing as he does your ability and reliability. Your future lies in your own keeping. The orders are that you shall leave at once with dispatches."
Fourès saw his chance at once and took it. When, however, he declared it his intention to take his wife, too, Berthier objected. It would be impossible, urged the famous Chief of the Staff, to allow Madame Fourès to run the risk of capture by English naval officers who—Berthieremphasised the point—were notorious for their taste in Frenchwomen. Besides, there was the discomfort of confinement on board a battleship, which would give the British officers every excuse for treating the lady as quite other than a prisoner of war, whatever they might do with himself.Et puis, ce cochon de Sir Seedny Smeet—ah, Fourès, mon ami, voyons donc!And so poor Captain Fourès left Egypt on board theChasseur, commanded by Captain Laurens, while Bonaparte installed Madame Fourès near the palace of Elfi Bey, where he himself resided, and thereafter lived with her as openly as he had lived with the actress Grassini in Milan.
As mischance would have it, theChasseurwas captured by the British man-o'-warLion, commanded by Sir Sidney Smith, under whose orders John H. Barnett was then serving as secret agent. On their meeting for the second time, the Englishman said to Fourès:
"Well, Captain, you must now be edified at the moral character of the scoundrel whom the Directory has given you for Commander-in-Chief in Egypt."
"What do you mean, sir?" asked the Frenchman, with some colour.
"Don't be angry, Captain," replied Barnett. "I understand your heat and will try to cool it. Listen: as we consider you to be the victim of a disgraceful intrigue on the part of Bonaparte, we propose to land you on the Egyptian coast. Once arrived there, you will rejoin your corps andregain possession of Madame Fourès, your former wife."
"Sir," exclaimed the now indignant Frenchman, "will you be pleased to explain?"
"That," replied Barnett, "is exactly what I am endeavouring to do, and if you will have the patience to listen, you may understand."
Thereupon the secret-service man drew from his pocket several newspaper cuttings which gave full details of the scandal in which the names of Madame Fourès and Bonaparte were associated. The story showed, furthermore, the arrangement by which Fourès had been induced to carry dispatches to the Directory, Bonaparte being well aware at the time he entrusted the Captain with his mission that only a miracle could enable him to elude the vigilance of the British cruisers and pass over to France. Once he became a prisoner of war, Bonaparte would be assured of the possession and enjoyment of his new mistress.
The Captain's emotion on hearing of his commander's treachery and his wife's connivance in the trick was painful to witness, and the poor fellow broke down under the ordeal. His papers, it was proved to him, were of no importance whatever, and Barnett showed him duplicates which had been taken of them before the Captain had even left Cairo.
"When you arrive at headquarters," the relentless Barnett proceeded, "one of our agents will conduct you to the palace of Elfi Bey, where Madame Fourès has lived with Bonaparte sinceDecember 18, the date of your departure with the dispatches. As for your fellow-officers, they all know of the affair and you have become the object of the army's ridicule throughout Egypt. As a man of honour you will doubtless know how to avenge yourself on both culprits. Life is cheap in Egypt in these days, Captain."
In due course Captain Fourès reached Cairo and soon realised that Barnett had told him nothing more than the truth. His wife remained a willing prisoner with Bonaparte. Accordingly he prepared for action, meaning to kill his two betrayers. It was pointed out to him that in view of the existence of martial law and his failure to carry the dispatches entrusted to him, the Commander-in-Chief would be justified in having him shot; while his friends urged, knowing the man's character, that, after all, to risk his career for a worthless woman, in a quarrel with a man like Bonaparte, was worse than madness. The Captain determined, however, to see his wife and obtain an avowal from her own lips as to the facts of the whole intrigue. According to the records, Fourès found her, still unrisen, at the mansion of Elfi Bey, learned from her own admission that she was satisfied with her present lot and, without further parley, flogged the strumpet till she writhed in agonies on her bedroom floor. Fatality of fatalities, who should enter and find her in this condition, but Bonaparte himself. He gazed for one dramatic moment at the shrieking woman and turned with a raucouslaugh on his heel. Fourès, in due course, procured his divorce and made, as he himself declared, "a sacrifice of his resentment against Napoleon to France and the Army." As it happened, the luck was, on this occasion, against the British Secret Service agents. Had Bonaparte fallen a victim to the jealous rage of Fourès, should we have had a Trafalgar, an Austerlitz, a Jena, a Waterloo? There are not wanting those who maintain that all these historic events were in the inevitable logic of the French Revolution and that with a Bonaparte, or without him, they must in their due turn have come to pass—a question which is far too large for present discussion. In any case, it is certain that Bonaparte's removal in 1799 would have relieved many European cabinets of much anxiety.
The bibliography connected with the business of espionage is not, as may be supposed, a very extensive one. Great spies have all written their memoirs, but in no case can these works be regarded as trustworthy records of the actual parts played by their writers in important historic events or episodes, and it is always necessary to go to independent chroniclers in order to arrive at the truth. As regards themselves, they are peculiarly fortunate in that highly placed patrons and collaborators have rarely, if ever, condescended to criticise or question their claims or statements, the result being that their most preposterous pretensions find acceptance at face value. It is well, too, that not one of them, as far as the writer has discovered, evinces anything like literary tact in his attempts to conceal the essentially underhand nature of his professional art. Your Schulmeisters and Stiebers, on the bare evidence of their own life stories, disclose their real motives and characters so clearly and intimately as to leave us with the impression that it is only very poor judges of human nature who can fail to categorise them accurately.
Our own study of the master spy has left us unimpressed regarding the qualities of either head or heart which are called for in the business of espionage, and whatever courage may appear to attach to the characters of men like Schulmeister, Stieber and even André, we remain convinced that there was in none of them anything like nobility of purpose and that a very cheap material ambition underlay all their respective rôles, dramatic though those rôles may have been. The characters of the two spies of the War of Independence seem to us to have been lamentably lacking in that fine spirituality which one looks for in men who are willing to die for any strong faith that is in them; the American appears to have been an idealist of a type which is not easily differentiable from the oriental fanatic who is said to possess no very settled convictions about his cause; while the Englishman's motives were based purely upon rapid self-advancement. As to Le Caron, we admit having approached his case with every predisposition to admire him, only to find our earlier illusions entirely shattered after a careful study of his reminiscences; and the printed word must be allowed to go a long way towards self-revelation. As for Schulmeister, he threw his lot in with the side which paid him the highest price, and patriotism or nobility of sentiment in no way coloured his otherwise important abilities and services, while Stieber—the odious Stieber was at once a cringing self-seeker, a bragging bully and, shorn of his protections,an obvious and elemental coward. MacParlan was a detective pure and simple, and to him there attaches no stigma of having taken an oath to serve a cause which secretly he meant to betray. Of all the rôles enacted by the various exponents of espionage with whom we have dealt, MacParlan's appears to us to have been far and away the most heroic and, in view of the dread organisation which he was fighting single-handed, also the most patriotic and utilitarian.
In regard to the sources which we have drawn upon, those which deal with Schulmeister call for some comment. Napoleon's agent is mentioned by many of the high functionaries of the Empire who published memoirs dealing with its glittering legend. Savary, Fouché, Rapp and Marbot all give him a word, while Thiers, much later, mentions him as having contributed a share to the glories of the Corsican. With the exception of the short Life by Diffenbach, and his own very unreliableFragments, we are aware of no exhaustive biography of the spy, while magazine and newspaper articles, such as those published in theAllgemeine Zeitung, theCourrier du Bas-Rhinand other periodicals, differ altogether as to details and chronology in descriptions of him. The author remembers to have read, when a student in Germany, many years back, an account of Schulmeister obviously written by an Alsatian and signed with the name, F. Ott, which gave particulars as to the spy's first meeting withNapoleon, as well as the story of his social career in Vienna before joining the army of Mack. These particulars are not mentioned by any other writers except Savary and a scribe inThe Royal United Service Magazineof December 1897. In view of so many conflicting accounts, however, we have thought it fair to draw upon this recollection in our own story of the Alsatian, although at present we cannot recall the exact source.
Le Caron has, of course, been his own biographer and the popular Press of the time of the Parnell Commission teems with accounts, correct or imaginary, of the Anglo-American major. Sir Robert Anderson, in his reminiscences, speaks of his agent in terms of consideration and respect. In a letter which Sir Robert was so good as to write to the author, in this connection, appear the following remarks:—
"My best agents, when I had charge of secret-service work, were as much entitled to respect as were my officers in the Criminal Investigation Department when I had charge of that branch of Police work, or as our military who 'spy' the German trenches from aeroplanes. Others again take up that sort of work for 'filthy lucre sake,' and yet others from all sorts of motives, some praiseworthy and some contemptible. Spies differ as much as parsons or doctors, and no general rule can be applied to them. Le Caron was in every way a worthier and more respectableman than were some of the M.P.'s who abused him in Parliament. Some of my other agents were much in the same category. Others, again, who gave me information of great value, were creatures whom it was an ordeal to have to deal with."
"My best agents, when I had charge of secret-service work, were as much entitled to respect as were my officers in the Criminal Investigation Department when I had charge of that branch of Police work, or as our military who 'spy' the German trenches from aeroplanes. Others again take up that sort of work for 'filthy lucre sake,' and yet others from all sorts of motives, some praiseworthy and some contemptible. Spies differ as much as parsons or doctors, and no general rule can be applied to them. Le Caron was in every way a worthier and more respectableman than were some of the M.P.'s who abused him in Parliament. Some of my other agents were much in the same category. Others, again, who gave me information of great value, were creatures whom it was an ordeal to have to deal with."
MacParlan's career was well known to many of the old stagers of the New York and Philadelphia newspapers, and from one who knew him, the writer has taken the version he gives of the admirable detective's final disappearance from the coal regions of Pennsylvania, according it preference over the somewhat prosaic departure as told by MacParlan's excellent biographer, Mr Dewees. While volumes have been written to the glorification of Major André, it is unfortunate that very little is known regarding Nathan Hale, and it is certain that no portrait remains extant of that youthful hero. The Duchess of Portsmouth has been fully dealt with by many writers; the Chevalier d'Eon has had the advantage of being portrayed by the late Mr Andrew Lang, while Pingaud has treated the Count d'Antraigues. The French Divisional Police Chief Saint-Just has given to the world an account of the French Internal Spy System as it exists in our own day, and Doctor Fitzpatrick is the chief among many who have written of the British Secret Service, to the chapter concerning which we append a Home Office paper, issued in September 1914, which clearly shows that theBritish authorities were by no means uninformed or unmindful of the contemplated operations of the swarms of German spies who filled London hotels and lodging-houses at the opening of the War. Official alertness, it may also be said, was shown during the course of the campaign, as (to cite but one instance) when the Special Police Constables were mobilised on the night of the air raid on Sandringham and therearound, a fact which spoke eloquently for our system of counter-espionage.
With regard to the German System of Espionage, it must be said that while we do not accept everything that the arrogant Stieber claims for his organisation and himself, we are inclined to look upon Lanoir as being too much a hater of all things Prussian either to do justice to himself or to be fair to Stieber. In any case, we have supplemented the French writer's views by others emanating from Klembowsky, A. Froment, Tissot and various publicists well known in France. The work of Mr Graves we have read, and while admitting that he wins our sympathy as regards his perennial good humour and cleverness, we confess our total inability to "negotiate" (as he himself would probably say) his version of the instructions to thePantherat Agadir, the same having really been conveyed by the very ordinary process of telegraphing from Berlin to the gunboat's commander by code to theFabranews agency at Madrid, whence the message travelled to Tangier and Agadir. In the pages ofThe NewYork AmericanMr Graves's diplomatic work would certainly prove to be "just the goods," if we may judge by the printed European dispatches of that paper's ineffable correspondents. All his English countesses and peers have respectively the airs and manners of Chicago "store-ladies" and Buffalo drummers—exactly as the American yellow-paper requires them for home consumption.
Following is a short list of the principal publications to which the writer referred in the course of his work:—
[1]Frederick was childless.[2]It has even been stated that the funds which enabled the so-called Suffragettes to carry on their recent militant propaganda were, for the greater part, supplied by Berlin, through private persons acting on behalf of its secret service. The identity of the real donors of very large sums given for the furtherance of the movement was said not to have been known even to the Suffragette leaders.
[1]Frederick was childless.
[1]Frederick was childless.
[2]It has even been stated that the funds which enabled the so-called Suffragettes to carry on their recent militant propaganda were, for the greater part, supplied by Berlin, through private persons acting on behalf of its secret service. The identity of the real donors of very large sums given for the furtherance of the movement was said not to have been known even to the Suffragette leaders.
[2]It has even been stated that the funds which enabled the so-called Suffragettes to carry on their recent militant propaganda were, for the greater part, supplied by Berlin, through private persons acting on behalf of its secret service. The identity of the real donors of very large sums given for the furtherance of the movement was said not to have been known even to the Suffragette leaders.