"One day a gendarme who wished to water his horse approached a well in the garden of an abandoned house. At the bottom of the well there was not truth but treason. Comfortably installed in this disused shaft a German spy was engaged in making his report by telephone to the German Intelligence Department. "The mentality of the spy can never be explained, for how can one account for the mixture of the fine quality of bravery and the despicable greed of money which will keep a man in a city like Rheims, exposed every hour of the day and night to death from the splinter of a shell fired at the town by his own paymasters? I do not suggest for a moment that of the 20,000 people who still inhabit the town of Rheims and its cellars there is any large proportion of traitorous spies, but to the French Intelligence Department there is no question whatsoever that there is still a very efficient spying organisation at work in the city." Among us here in Great Britain, I repeat, are men--hundreds of them--who are daily, nay hourly, plotting our downfall, and are awaiting the signal to act as the German General Staff has arranged that they shall act. To attempt to disguise the fact longer is useless. We have lived in the fool's paradise which the Government prepared for us long enough. We were assured that there would be no war. But war has come, and thousands of the precious lives of our gallant lads have been lost--and thousands more will yet be lost. We cannot trust the German tradesman who has even lived long among us apparently honourable and highly respected. A case in point is that of a man who, for the past twenty-six years, has carried on a prosperous business in the North of London. At the outbreak of war he registered himself as an alien, and one day asked the police for a permit to travel beyond the regulation five miles in order to attend a concert. He was watched, and it was found that, instead of going to the concert, he had travelled in an opposite direction, where he had met and conferred with a number of his compatriots who were evidently secret agents. This is but one illustration of many known cases in the Metropolis. Can we still close our eyes to what Germany intends to do? The Government knew the enemy's intentions when, in 1908, there was placed before them the Emperor's speech, which I have already reproduced. Perhaps it may not be uninteresting if I recount how I myself was approached by the German General Staff--and I believe others must have been approached in a like manner. The incident only serves to show the "astuteness"--as Lord Haldane has so well put it--of our enemies.