The best agencies absolutely decline to touch divorce and matrimonial cases of any sort. It does not do a detective agency any good to have its men constantly upon the witness stand subject to attack, with a consequent possible reflection upon their probity of character and truthfulness. Moreover, a good detective is too valuable a person to be wasting his time in the court-room. In the ordinary divorce case the detective, having procured his evidence, is obliged to remain on tap and subject to call as a witness for at least three or four months, during which time he cannot be sent away on distant work. Neither can the customer be charged ordinarily for waiting time, and apart from its malodorous character the business is not desirable from a financial point of view. The national agencies prefer clean criminal work, murder cases, and general investigating. They no longer undertake any policing, strike-breaking, or guarding. The most ridiculous misinformation in regard to their participation in this sort of work has been spread broadcast largely by jealous enemies and by the labor unions. By way of illustration, one Thomas Beet, describing himself as an English detective, contributed an article to the New York _Tribune_ of September 16, 1906, in which he said: “In one of the greatest of our strikes, that involving the steel industry, over two thousand armed detectives were employed supposedly to protect property, while several hundred more were scattered in the ranks of strikers as workmen. Many of the latter became officers in the labor bodies, helped to make laws for the organizations, made incendiary speeches, cast their votes for the most radical movements made by the strikers, participated in and led bodies of the members in the acts of lawlessness that eventually caused the sending of State troops and the declaration of martial law. While doing this, these spies within the ranks were making daily reports of the plans and purposes of the strikers. To my knowledge, when lawlessness was at its height and murder ran riot, these men wore little patches of white on the lapels of their coats so that their fellow detectives of the two thousand would not shoot them down by mistake.”