but loosely differentiate between the act of spying and that of betrayal, the presumption always remaining that the man who is capable of being a successful and voluntary spy also possesses talents which are common to the elemental traitor. The penalty of death, says Bluntschli, should be such as to terrify all spies, and it is the custom accordingly to execute them ignominiously by hanging. Technically the spy has been defined as one who clandestinely goes in quest of information, whilst a traitor is one who spies within his own community and to its undoing. Although most authorities agree in considering espionage as lawful among the ruses of warfare, all, with one exception, concur in determining that death remains the only logical desert of the man who has possessed himself of secrets upon which the common safety depends. Certain international jurists have objected to the employment, in any cause, of spies, as being immoral, or as condoning acts which are of themselves immoral, and the French writer Morin looks upon espionage with particular horror on the ground that it is "usually malice aforethought and is never voluntary," a peculiar enough view. It is especially blameable, he holds, because a premium is placed upon essentially dishonest dealing, although he admits, with some inconsistency, that it may sometimes become lawful—when it is unsoiled by perfidy, as he puts it. Only the last emergency can at all justify it, says Morin, who is singular in declaring that a spy should not be put to death unless caught in the act. Napoleon himself displayed an unexpected leniency wherever possible towards captured spies, and this on the ground, as he said, that the spy is, by his nature, a base character. In the opinion of the great soldier the best spy is the half-breed who is a natural cosmopolitan and is consequently unaffected by ideas of patriotism. His greatest spy, Schulmeister, was a man of decidedly mongrel antecedents and began life as a smuggler. Pedlars he also declared to be invaluable in espionage, and for the reason that they are naturally disposed to vagabondage, itself a trait of degeneracy. It is well known that he would only employ in such work men whose past had been soiled by some act of a disgraceful or criminal kind, and like the great Frederick, it was his custom to propose to actually convicted criminals their enlargement as the reward of a successful piece of spying.

Modern spies of the professional type, more especially those employed by Germany, fully meet the specifications of Napoleon's idea of the race. The accomplished spy of to-day is invariably a man of at least quasi-criminal proclivities, a being entirely lacking in a moral sense, a degenerate briefly; and indeed experts in the secret history of the German special-information departments all agree in declaring that a "white man," to use an Americanism, is worse than useless to the experts at the chief bureau of the Berlin Secret Service. As a consequence, their corps d'élite is mostly made up of men who, if they have not known the inside of prisons, have at least earned an unequivocal right to such knowledge. One of the profoundest technicians in the business of organising spy campaigns, the late Karl Stieber, has stated that the most valuable spy is your born aristocrat with a bad record and a worse reputation. Proof of the soundness of this view would seem to have been fully advanced by the noble interveners in the Dreyfus case, and, in any event, it is known that among the names of the organising staff of Berlin's school for spies, a large number are those who bear the names of famous families, while the remainder, if not all gentlemen by birth, are at least gentlemen by act of parliament, as the saying is. Courage, aplomb, the possession of what Americans so aptly term "a good front," easy manners and a genial temperament—of any or all of these qualifications, a man of good birth is only in rare cases devoid. Heredity alone has given him many of the psychic requirements that go to make up the most valuable of actors in a desperate situation, including, perhaps, that philosophy of absolute insouciance which makes of him the most sinister and cold-blooded of all criminal agents.

It would be unfair, however, to accuse the Germans of monopolising all those vicious characteristics which go to form the complete spy. Indeed, it would probably be nearer the mark to declare that it is only because of the elaborate excellence of the German organisation that the Teuton has signalised himself so prominently these later times in espionage. For, in truth, the Teutonic mind is fundamentally lacking, it is well known, in those qualities of craft and imagination which produce the best kind of secret service agent. Perseverance and the philosophy which knows how to wait on circumstances, these conventional enough qualities he undoubtedly possesses in a marked degree above his fellows. Nevertheless, they are not the most important requirements of the master-spy, whose base diplomacy and its results must depend to a great extent upon the exercise of constructive imagination and the forcing of circumstances to suit his particular strategy. The German has excelled his congeners at the business in the opinion of modern men solely for the reason that among the Germans the trade of the spy is not accounted more dishonourable than any other. In all probability, however, the Italian, the Greek, the Kelt, given a highly systematised school and an equal ethical standpoint, would prove abler executants in any mission which called for the employment of deep-set guile, the power of divining motives and the ability to calculate the effect of moves. The essential arts of the diplomatist—has not an ambassador been described as an official spy?—underlie, in respect of the mental operations required, the work of your successful secret service agent, and although men like Bismarck, whose mentality was not of a positively Teutonic cast, may be cited in disproof of the statement, it is certain that the German mind is less adapted and less adaptable to the fine processes of the arts of political negotiation than that of either the Kelt or the Italian.

Women, it is interesting to learn, from high authorities on the arts of espionage, are rarely effective or satisfactory agents in secret service. Not, it must be understood, that woman is incapable of the requisite baseness that is, in the successful spy, an indispensable quality. Far from it. Goethe, who was a competent judge of the sex, has placed on record his view that woman, when intent on turpitude, is capable of sounding lower depths than the vilest of the male species. German experts are, however, unanimous in eliminating to a minimum point the services of women as spies, and that too on the ground that they are rarely to be relied upon if once romantic sentiment becomes engaged in their operations—an ever-present possibility. "Any woman but a German woman" was a common cry of Karl Stieber who may be trusted to have well understood the character of his fair compatriot, for whom love and romance—the purer the better—constitute the only things worth living for in this drab enough world. Indeed, the famous Salic Law is said to have owed its first enacting mainly to the fact that German women were as a rule found to be unreliable, shall we say? where their intimate feelings were apt to become involved, and those who have resided in Germany will not require to be told that a handsome face and a brave air, added to a romantic bent, go very much further with women in the land of beer, love and song than with their sisters in perhaps any other country in the world. The work of the efficient spy involves, it is clear, a peculiar but none the less specific