Under the euphemism Secret Service, we describe in England our system of espionage. In common with other countries, espionage has always prevailed in England as essential in some degree to most conditions of our political, social, diplomatic and commercial life, all of which are conducted on the most comprehensive and complex lines. The story of England has, however, revealed but little of the spy in any class and, indeed, next to nothing at all when considered in proportion to the vastness of its national and international relations and commitments, a happy state of affairs which is attributable to the fact that our constitutional liberties represent the nearest approach to the ideal in respect of the completeness of their guarantees. Going back to early periods, it is only in the case of prominent figures like Alfred—who did his own spying, it will be remembered—or the seventh Henry, or Wolsey, that we find there was anything like the beginnings of an organised secret service system. The father of King Harry, through the agency of his lawyers Empson and Dudley, undoubtedly spied out the financial conditions of the territorial nobles as well as the monastic properties, and by doing so, certainly facilitated the seizure of the Abbey possessions when the Reformation took place in the next reign. The agents employed in the case of the wealthy landowners were usually chaplains who also exercised secretarial functions for their patrons, while in the monasteries renegade monks were always to be found willing at a price to put Henry's financial sleuths in the way of obtaining correct information. The Lord Cardinal, there is no doubt, spied on the goings and comings of Campeggio when that legate was in England, and neither is there any doubt of his having spied successfully, and much to the irritation of the monarch, on King Henry himself who retaliated, however, more than once by informing the Chancellor as to certain romantic but very unpriestly trysts of the Cardinal which had come within the royal cognisance. In royal circles, of course, we may be sure that spying has always been the custom, all the more so since household officers justify their persistent attentions on the ground that the safety of the royal person requires that it should be perennially shadowed. Did not FouchÉ once surprise Napoleon, who was boasting of the superiority of service rendered by his own corps d'espions, when he informed the Emperor regarding every detail of a nocturnal outing which Majesty had made through Paris in company with Murat, and in the course of which visits were paid, in turn, to a low music-hall, a lower night-house and a cheap restaurant?

To find the first definite shapings of organised secret service we must come to the time of Elizabeth when the Intelligencer and the Spy were well-known characters in the society of the period. The Intelligencer proves highly interesting as a study of the purely parasitical life. In general, he started in life as a man who made it his business to learn what was going on at all the main centres of public and private life, trading off the items to men of business, politicians and diplomatists for the best price he could obtain. He corresponded very closely to the Roman quidnunc with whom the Satires of Horace made us all familiar in our schooldays. Who can forget the picture of that oily Nasidienus—what a nose for news the name holds!—whose chief title to dine with MÆcenas depended on the fact that he constituted in his own person a kind of central news agency upon which all the gossip and intelligence of Rome was sure to converge. For indeed, the famous quidnunc had his own corps of reporters whom he employed to scour the City in quest of tittle-tattle for his patron. The Intelligencer or private newsmonger of Elizabeth's age was, it is recorded, looked upon as a highly respectable member of the workaday classes until, to use a journalistic Americanism, he began to "put it over" on his patrons—meaning to say, when he began to supply them with the news that was not, drawing good money in exchange for false intelligence. Like the free-lance of our own day, the Intelligencer had first of all to build up a connection, as the phrase goes, the same being remunerative, or the reverse, in proportion to the man's energy and reliability. Since in those days he invariably dealt with principals, it happened not so seldom that he effected a permanent way into the good graces of a wealthy patron, rising afterwards to positions of honourable importance. It is, nevertheless, a fact that the majority of these men deteriorated, and for the simple reason that, deeply versed as they became in the sordid architectonics of life of all kinds, social, political and commercial, they quickly shed their ideals. Their previous experience and knowledge of ways and means had, however, fitted them in a peculiar manner for the business of watching other men and they were invariably sought out by personages of wealth and position to exercise the trade of spy, or common informer. And, accordingly, when Burleigh and his congeners were looking around for plausible excuses for killing off Mary of Scotland, they fell back on the services of an informer who had originally made his bow before the public as an Intelligencer. It is not necessary to go into the story of the mysterious "J. B.," whom one Delbena, an Italian adventurer, had introduced to the English Ambassador in Paris, Poulet, as a man of good birth, but desperate in all enterprises and a traitor to the last fibre of his spinal column. The records of Elizabethan days would seem to indicate either that Burleigh and Walsingham were not very astute judges of the common spy, or else that "J. B." was devilishly apt in extracting large sums out of credulous statesmen and diplomats, for it is written that having raised many thousands from Poulet on his simple promise to capture an agent of Mary Stuart, whose papers were certain to incriminate that Queen—why, the rascal failed to deliver goods, to use another expressive newspaper Americanism. Then there was the informer Gifford whose early training as a priest enabled him, in his clerical capacity and with forged credentials, to spy on the great Catholic families of his time, in all cases transmitting false yet incriminating information to Burleigh. His nefarious activities brought at least a dozen men to the execution block in those days. In two years another of the species, one Thomas Phillips, also an ex-Intelligencer, had contracted to the Crown a debt equal to the large sum of £60,000 of our own money on account of infamous work done for its ministers, mostly political, be it said. Indeed, the record of the Elizabethan spy constitutes one long chronicle of the bloodiest treachery in the whole history of secret service, since the Tower, if not Tyburn, invariably figured as the last scene in the life of the unfortunate who fell into the hands of the Queen's sleuths. Treachery seems, for all the halo which surrounds our notion of the "good old days," to have played a part in the whole social fabric as universal as it was sinister, nor can the fact be wondered at, seeing that the promiscuous distribution of the confiscated estates of murdered men, which often in a day rewarded poor men with vast lands, was an ever-present incentive to the cupidity of the adventurer.

Cromwell, if we may judge by diaries and records of his day, was the best-informed man in England. He had an undoubted faith in the value of secret service and was ably served by the many agents he employed, not only at home, but also abroad, where their activities helped to lay the broad foundations of that foreign policy which is based upon the principle known as the Balance of Power. It was the Protector's custom to invite to his table men whom he well knew to be what the current vernacular of the time termed "trimmers" and what the American calls a "mugwump"; these men he invariably surprised with the correctness of his information regarding the variety of their political friends and relations, as well as of the dangerous company which they frequented, advising them always in a friendly way to beware. The Protector was one of the few statesmen in Europe who remained a perennial puzzle to Mazarin, during whose large ascendancy on the Continent, Cromwell strengthened the foundations of that naval power which has given England for so long a paramount voice in Europe's councils. His successor Charles II. distinguished himself above all other English monarchs by receiving into his intimate court circle a paid spy of Louis XIV. in the person of Louise de KÉrouaille, on whom he conferred the title of Duchess of Portsmouth. This lady, as Duchesse d'Aubigny in France, was at the same time drawing a ducal revenue from the coffers of Louis XIV., while it remains a matter of statistical record that in the year 1681 she took in perquisite from the English Exchequer the sum of £136,000—equal to more than half-a-million sterling of our time. There can be little doubt that the capacity for political intrigue of the Duchess, as well as her complete ascendancy over Charles and her own greed of money, contributed at a later stage to swell the indictment which ultimately led to the banishment of the Stuarts. In her Life of the Duchess, Mrs Colquhoun Grant takes a view generally accepted by historical writers, to wit, that the favourite's character was neither vicious nor depraved, that her conduct was not immoral according to the notions of the age, that she was a woman of immense political capacity, while of a tender and affectionate heart. Her political correspondence, in which she exercised her specific rÔle as informer to the French court, was carried on with Madame de Montespan, who is memorable as one of the splendid favourites of Louis.

Passing over to Georgian times we find that the employment of spies was common in all departments of life, and there can be little doubt that the Hanoverians brought to England many men and women who had learned the arts of espionage at the best of all possible schools—namely, Berlin. The history of England of those days shows us nothing in the way of pre-eminent exponents of the business, nor can espionage be said, in its political aspects, to have reached to that excellence of organisation which it attained later in the times of Pitt, whom the ever-present activities of Bonaparte compelled in the interests of our security to develop a secret-service system the operations of which were inferior to none in Europe. It remains a matter of record that in the days of the French Revolution certain political leaders in England were in the pay of the Committee of Public Safety presided over by Robespierre. This fact was communicated to Pitt through his own spy, a professedly violent Jacobin, who by means of cipher and anagrammatic correspondence, carried on with a relative in Italy, was transmitting by that roundabout route the most minute and accurate accounts of the Committee's proceedings to the English Premier. The sums paid for such dangerous work, while never, of course, disclosed, were undoubtedly very large, seeing that the all-observant Saint-Just was moving at the time through Revolutionary circles. The failure of the French invasion of Ireland in December 1796 is also set down to an act of paid treachery on the part of the captain of one of the French vessels, the story being that he took advantage of prevailing foul weather to decline approaching the Irish coast for several days, and since the general commanding the expedition was on board, the brave venture became a foregone failure. Charles Lever, who, it will be remembered, acted as British Consul at Spezzia and Trieste, introduces us on more than one occasion to a kind of consular or ambassadorial spy, an individual who in those days was as regular a member of a chancellery as its archivist is in our own.

In the time of Napoleon, Charles James Fox, an admirer and friend of the First Consul, found himself, all unconsciously, caught in the vast woof of the FouchÉ-Talleyrand system of intelligence, thus becoming an unwitting agent in communicating to the French Government certain of the designs of the British Government for the destruction of Bonaparte's Continental policy. The fact that Fox was a desperate gambler, and ever in debt, was not of course allowed to escape the notice of his few, but bitter, enemies, who in this case were obviously moved by malice rather than by anything they really knew. The cleverness of Canning in procuring private information regarding the secret clauses of the Treaty of Tilsit between Alexander of Russia and Napoleon is commonly regarded as among the greatest achievements of diplomacy in all time. How the British foreign minister obtained this information will probably remain a secret for ever; but the momentous results of his cleverness are indisputable, since they led to the seizure of the Danish fleet and broke up the northern confederation of powers by which Napoleon still hoped to invade England, and some analogy to which is found at our own time in the occupation of Belgium by the Germans, England having been the main objective in both cases. Conjecture is, of course, not wanting as to the means which placed this intelligence in the hands of Canning. According to one writer, a certain Lady Sarah Spencer, in a letter addressed to her father at Althorp, declared at the time that "Lord G. L. Gower had got possession, for £20,000, of the original treaty of Tilsit and that one of the secret articles stipulated that the Danish fleet should be employed against us, which induced Ministers to adopt such measures." It is declared by a member of the Mackenzie clan that one Colin Mackenzie, who perfectly understood and spoke French, disguised himself as a Cossack and was one of the attendants chosen to accompany the Russian Emperor to the raft on which the interview with Napoleon was held—a story which does not, it must be said, meet with very cordial acceptance. Again it is asserted that the famous Launay, Count d'Antraigues, obtained the treaty from a friend in Russia, a version which seems disproved by the fact that the Count was at that time in disgrace in England. On Sir Robert Wilson has also been conferred the distinction of discovering the secret understandings of Tilsit, while the tradition of the Foreign Office is that the information came indirectly from the Emperor Alexander and was given publicity through some blunder on the part of the Russian Ambassador in London—most probably the correct facts.

The enactment of the Union between England and Ireland led in its time to the commission of untold treacheries. Until within a score of years ago there stood in the private offices of Dublin Castle two iron-clamped chests filled to the top with papers relating to pre-Union days. These chests bore the Government seal and on them was inscribed the legend: "Secret and confidential—not to be opened." For close upon a century, these chests remained unexplored until, leave having been given for their examination, hundreds of betrayals and treacheries leapt to light. Men of the highest names, says Dr Fitzpatrick, in effect, were found to have been spies of the Government and practically agents provocateurs, although to the outer world they bore themselves as high-souled patriots of unimpeachable honour. The various causes in which these men served were not less filled with the foulness of secret crime than outwardly they proved to be fraught with deliberately constructed outrage and injustice to a whole nation. Coming down to more modern days, we seize upon the story of Major Le Caron. This man's adventure among the open and admitted enemies of England shows us the meagre extent to which our Government is prepared to subsidise its agents abroad. Le Caron is not singular in his criticism of the British authorities who, by a consistent policy of paying starvation pay, have reduced the secret service to the proportions of a vanishing quantity. Le Caron warned the authorities of their fatal and improvident parsimony in his time. "Some day," he said, "a big thing will happen about which there will be no leakage beforehand and then the affrighted and indignant British citizen will turn on his band of thirty secret-service men and rant and rave at them for their want of capacity and performance. The fault will be the want of a perfect system of secret service, properly financed. If plots are to be discovered in time, they can only be discovered through information coming from men associated with them. If it is to be made worth their while to speak, then the price offered by the British Government must be higher than that of the other paymasters." Le Caron's words are clearly based on the assumption that men enter into revolutionary movements rather for what there is in them, than from any spiritual or ethical motives. Until far more evidence than we possess is afforded us, we fear that the spy must be held to be right, for the tortuous path of political agitation is a path which is ever crowded with self-seekers and one on which the altruist is always the loneliest of pilgrims.

In the course of the trials of Captains Trench and Brandon at Leipsic in 1910, the public prosecutor emphasised his view that British gold had bought up the services of hundreds of agents scattered throughout Germany, all of them engaged in the business of transmitting important information to the British Admiralty and War Office. Visitors to what is known as the Black Country of Westphalia will recollect, too, how ordinary English tourists who arrive at towns in the neighbourhood of Essen, the home of Krupp, such as Bochum, or Wesel, or Elberfeld invariably become the objects of police attention from the moment of their arrival at local hotels. It is certain that espionage on the part of the foreigner excites more real concern in Germany than is the case in England, a fact that we must put down to her geographical position which leaves her, despite vast armaments and preparations, an ever-possible object of attack to heavily armed nations which surround her on all sides. Even, however, if it be the fact that England has held her spies within Germany itself, few will be found to argue that it is not a legitimate use of secret service funds, as well as a matter altogether apart from the infamy which attaches to the person who accepts money in return for the betrayal of fatherland. It is, nevertheless, very questionable if any information really worth having, in the military sense, ever escapes the record of duly appointed military attachÉs, whose official existence dates from 1864 and whose admitted business it is to keep themselves professionally posted as to the resources of a possible enemy. In regard to Germany, it may be said that in the business of spying, she occupies a class by herself, since professional espionage is not looked upon by the people as in any way degrading or underhand. An easy tolerance of this kind towards a trade which is in itself intrinsically base cannot, it must follow, be without a corresponding reaction on the common mind in regard to spying for the benefit of foreign powers, and we may reasonably assume it to be the fact that in such cases the British authorities go far less frequently in quest of native spies, than the native spies come in quest of British gold. A sum of less than £40,000 is annually set aside for the purposes of the British Secret Service, according to official books. The smallness of the sum must clearly be some index of the limits of our secret-service operations, although no one is asked to suppose that the amount in question covers the entire expenditure made on account of useful information given up. Germany, it is known, makes a public appropriation of, roughly, £1,000,000 sterling for the secret-service system. Russia's budget for the same object amounts to £500,000, while that of France is less than £200,000, as far, in all cases, as public figures are available. The public appropriations do not, of course, reveal anything like the entire sums expended, the facts as to which could be realised only by a survey of the various accounts of consular offices and embassies throughout Europe.

Much ink has been spilt and many public utterances have been made with the object of showing that the British Government had taken but perfunctory measures in order to fight the system of espionage which was preparing England for invasion, even as France had been prepared for invasion in 1870. Writers in the daily Press and members of Parliament had declared, by the end of August 1914, that anything more inadequate than the British system of what is known as counter-espionage—that is to say, the organising of spies to watch and report on Germans who were obviously overrunning the country in quest of information of military value—was inconceivable. After all, results afford the best test of the precautions taken, and it is on record that the ease and rapidity with which the authorities rounded up over 14,000 German and Austrian potential spies, within a few weeks of the outbreak of the war, came as an illuminating shock to the German Secret Service authorities themselves who had based their warlike decisions largely upon the hypothesis that England was still asleep. A well-known authority on such matters at the Home Office informed the writer in September 1914 that even the so-called "incendiary points"—that is to say, localities which had been marked out as suitable for the setting fire to houses, in the event of aerial raids on London—were being gradually and completely scheduled by vigilant officers of our Secret Service, and in such a way that nothing was left to assist the operations of possible spies who have succeeded in eluding enumeration by our somewhat silent and unofficious, but nevertheless eternally wakeful police. As we have said in another place, the German organisation of spies, internal and external, had been raised to a point under Stieber, beyond which, given the present conditions of the world and mankind, it was practically impossible to go, and since for the past twenty years and more, we have been in possession of the technical details of Stieberism, we may rely on it that the authorities, on their side, have not read in vain. Shortly after the outbreak of the Great War, and in order to allay the anxiety created by critics of such departments as are charged with the duty of watching the enemy in our midst, the Home Office issued the following statement dealing with measures which had been undertaken with a view to counteracting the operations of foreign spies scattered throughout the Islands:—