"Have you forgotten that England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity? "GOD SAVE IRELAND." It is hardly necessary to say that so obviously crude and inartistic an appeal had no effect upon an essentially acute and artistic race; and its positive inartisticity bears the hall-mark of your Prussian's incapacity for entering into the more intimate feelings of men of other nations, a point which need hardly be laboured, having in view recent and current bovine misconceptions on the part of German diplomatic agents both in Europe and America. A more serious attempt to "revolutionise" French railway systems was made in 1893 some few months after the granting of £4000 from the secret-service funds for the purposes of international pamphleteering. In August of that year the Mesnard pamphlet made its appearance containing an appeal to all workers connected with the railroad systems of France and urging them to take advantage of their country's dependence upon them in order to wring concessions in money from the Government, failing which a general and permanent strike was to be declared having the inevitable result of paralysing the country's energies and exposing it to attack on the part of its traditional enemy. The pamphlet was proved to have been issued from Geneva, a chief centre of the German international secret-service body. It was promptly disavowed by the labour unions of France, and it was well recognised at that period that its appearance was timed to create an industrial upheaval to coincide with the friction which the Dreyfus Affair was then causing between French and German diplomatists. During the course of several general strikes which have taken place in France within the past twenty years, it has clearly come to light that the charitable subscriptions made in support of the families of strikers by Frenchmen have been exceeded by contributions coming from German "sympathisers," in the proportion of twenty sovereigns to one. In the famous strike of boot-makers at Amiens in May 1893, for example, local subscriptions amounted to £48. At least £1000 was sent direct from Frankfurt![2] "In the last fifteen years," wrote Lanoir in 1910, "the instigation of strikes in French industries has been raised by the directors of the German Secret Police to the degree of a real principle of government." The same authority states that in 1893 he heard an ultra-Radical parliamentary candidate for the Seine Department declare that a German admirer, whom he did not know, had sent him £100 towards his election expenses. Stieber in his Memoirs affects to believe that this sum is commonly sent to any French parliamentarian who advocates a policy which is thought to be useful to German imperial interests.