the Civil War.

On the passing of Constantine to the Bosporus in the fourth century, Rome, in the process of the ages, became the centre of a vast ecclesiastical power. The work of the spy then reached the honours of a kind of consecration. Writers like Lachesnaie and Deville emphasise the view that ecclesiastics are especially fitted for the business of spying. Fouché and Talleyrand had been clerics in their early days and certainly both were masters in the business of organising special-information corps. In his works, too, the Prussian General, Karl von Decker, declares that "a secret which cannot be penetrated by a woman or a priest will never be penetrated." To tell the story of Church espionage would exhaust the capacity of a large library, and in this connection it may be said that adversaries of the Church of Rome have ever held that the Confessional was a purely political invention, the object of which was to spy upon the community. Whether this be so or not, it is fortunately not our business to decide; it is fair, however, to mention the prevalence of the view. In any case, clerics have ever proved themselves apt for the work of espionage, and in a collection of ordinances issued and signed by Louis XIV. in 1652, a certain Father Berthoud, "although an ecclesiastic, is authorised to disguise himself in any way he likes in Paris, Bordeaux, Blaye and elsewhere," for the purposes of spy work among the political and social enemies of the Crown. Cardinal Richelieu and his understudy, Père Joseph, practically inaugurated in France the system of opening private communications, a practice which was carried to its extreme under Napoleon, of whose daily budget of private letters, his fourth secretary, Fain, has told us much.

That the system of espionage persists to our own day in Continental colleges and convents under the control of congregational clerics, is a fact which is well known. Each division of a school is invariably placed under the chronic vigilance of a "surveillant," or watcher, who in his turn employs his own corps of spies, privileged boys moving among the masses of their congeners, marking their intentions, noting the relations of the younger boys with the older, getting information as to unlawful programmes to be carried out, ferreting out secret testimony as to the habits of suspect characters and, if possible, intercepting amorous billets which pass between elder boys in other divisions and the younger fry. In regard to these unwholesome liaisons the vigilance of the spies is certainly justified; but the system goes much deeper than this in foreign schools, its objects being to inquire into the most intimate details regarding the private character of a boy—heaven only knows why, if it is not for the pure love of finding out. Indeed, it must be allowed that the baser tendencies which are to be noted in the case of all spies, here display themselves in the form of a pruriency which often touches the indecent and always the unwholesome.

The real founder of the business of organised spying in modern times was Frederick the Great, who was wont to boast that his spies exceeded his cooks in the proportion of a hundred to one. It is impossible closely to read the story of Frederick, or even to study minutely his face as pictured, say, by Meyn, without becoming conscious of the fact that here was a being who realised in his personality the claim of the psychologists that great ability and criminal tendencies are often closely affiliated. Apart from what we know of his perverse eccentricities, it is certain that his deliberate elimination of all the higher ideals of humanity from a place in his political philosophy had the effect of making him as impersonal as an automaton where his material ambitions were concerned, and he knew no other. Like the true pragmatist he was, Frederick considered all things good in themselves which served his ends, and his policies were invariably conceived on his pet principle: "If honesty fails us, we have always dishonesty to fall back upon." He it was who laid the foundations of that policy of Prussianisation of which our story of Stieber tells in its turn, and in which no measure was to be considered too extreme or base, nor turpitude too abhorrent, provided it advanced the interests of his House and furthered its ambition to play in Europe that rôle which had passed to the Habsburgs by inheritance from the Cæsars. For Prussia Frederick sought a permanent predominance in Europe equal to all which Louis XIV. had exercised between 1661 and 1715. An understanding of these facts is really the condition of grasping the significance of the elaborate Prussian spy system of our own time.

Lastly comes the age of Napoleon, in which we find that, for all the essential militarism of the imperial regime, the spy really played a more prominent rôle in the social and political drama than in that of the camp, the great soldier, except in extraordinary cases of long-laid plans, as in the Austerlitz campaign, relying mainly on human cupidity touched by the magic of his gold, to find, as the occasion demanded, willing perverts to provide him with the information necessary to the success of his combinations.

III
LE CARON

Away back in the later eighties, when Ireland was in the throes of her penultimate fight for the principle of self-government, all true sons of Erin had marked out for their particular obloquy two individuals who have since become notorious—namely, Piggott, the forger, and Major Le Caron, the spy. Those whose memories travel back easily to the famous Times Commission will recollect how offensively both names stunk in the nostrils of all who supported the late Irish leader. Among Nationalists, it will be remembered, the spy was invariably spoken of under the name "Le Carrion," and even those who gave him the benefit of a proper pronunciation of his pseudonym were wont to utter it with that peculiarly hissing emphasis with which Irishmen, among all men, seem able to invest the names of those who run counter to their political bias. The positive venom which certain eloquent Nationalists seem actually to instil into the pronunciation of names like "Dublin Castle," "Major Trant," "Lord Clanricarde" lingers long afterwards in the memory of English listeners, just as the rattle of certain snakes is said ever afterwards to linger in the ears of those who have escaped them in the jungle. To hear the late Mr Biggar, for instance, utter the nom de guerre of the famous British spy was a real lesson in the onomatopœic art, and on his lips the name, otherwise inoffensive and, indeed, on English tongues a liquid enough quantity, was made to attain a sibilancy which was truly weird in its effect.