He was sent to America, and there discovered that envoys of Germany and Japan had met in New York with the object of completing an anti-American agreement. He succeeded in making a copy of the document and cabling it to the British Foreign Office. He never got any payment from England, however, so has decided to make the contents public. The agreement binds Germany not to interfere in a great Japanese scheme of colonisation in the South Seas. Graves afterwards published a book in which he professed to give away many of the secrets of the German spy system. Information we have received from other sources shows that a great deal of the book is well founded, and it may well be that on the whole it is a fairly reliable exposure of German methods. But the last thing one should do is to trust or believe the spy! According to Graves--whose account we should accept with considerable reserve--the heads of the departments of the spy-organisation in Berlin are all German officers, recruited from "the old feudal aristocracy." He declares that though they plan the work, they never execute it. "No active or commissioned officer," he says, "does Secret Service work." He shows, too, that whatever ethics they may hold about doing dirty work themselves, the German officers wash their hands entirely of the methods their subordinates may choose or find it necessary to adopt. One of them explained the matter to him in terms which admit of no misunderstanding. He said:-- We cannot afford to be squeamish. The interests at stake are too vast to let personal ethical questions stand in the way. What would be required of you in the first instance is to gain for us information such as we seek. The means by which you gain this information will be left entirely to your own discretion. We expect results. It was also made clear to him that he had only himself to depend upon, and if he got into trouble he would get no help. "Be pleased to understand," was the official warning given at the first interview, "that this service is dangerous, and no official assistance could be given in any circumstances." As to the agents employed in this work, Graves says the Personal Branch, the most important, is managed from the Wilhelmstrasse, the German Foreign Office, the Emperor in person, or his immediate Privy Councillor. He adds:-- The personnel consists of all classes of men and women. Princes and counts, lawyers and doctors, actors and actresses, mondaines of the great world, demi-mondaines of the half-world, waiters and porters, all are made use of as occasion requires. It may well happen that your interesting acquaintance in the saloon of an express steamer, or your charming companion in the tea-room of the Ritz, is the paid agent of some Government.