It was perhaps with some remorseful consciousness of the sorry tenor of his whole career that Stieber, about 1875, decided to exercise his talents in a more important branch of high politics than had been possible up to that time. Perhaps, too, it was with his pathetic quest of a patent of nobility in view that the sleuth thought out a plan for the consolidation of imperial Germany, which in his opinion must recommend itself to his omnipotent friend Bismarck. We do not, of course, rely implicitly on all he says in his Memoirs; but there is little doubt that his intimacy with the Chancellor was of the closest kind and that Bismarck encouraged his police-minister's counsels to every possible furtherance of imperial plans. It used credibly to be said that Stieber, who was, of course, a man of good education, especially sought out the historian Mommsen with a view to discussing with that luminary something about the secret of Rome's predominance in the world and of her hold upon her conquests. No records remain of any such conversations if they ever really took place, but we may be sure that if they did take place, Stieber was put in full possession of those principles of "dividing in order to govern"; of the strategic value of roads; of the garrisoning of subject countries by the troops of races mutually antipathetic; of the value of blood-letting in political combinations, to quote a memorable phrase of Napoleon. In any case by the year 1880, Stieber had presented a memorial to Prince Bismarck the political effects arising from which have been seen down to the most recent times and have mainly contributed to the costly militarism of the past generation. The railway systems of Germany were to be developed in the main with regard to their strategic military values, a consideration which had only been partly realised in the earlier construction of lines. In the second place, large appropriations for German Secret Service funds were annually to be set aside with the object of buying, or placing, traitors in every great country in Europe with which the German Empire, in accordance with its plan of dominating the Western World, was likely ever to come into conflict. As will be seen later, no country in Europe became exempt from the operations of German emissaries whether as spies or else as the agents of domestic unrest and revolution and all to the end that the new _urbs sacra_, Berlin, should be to the modern world all that Rome was to that of antiquity. It is not difficult therefore to understand that the secret-service fund sanctioned by the Reichstag had grown from £52,000 in 1867 to the sum of £800,000 in 1910. XII GERMAN SECRET SERVICE—_continued_