representation of Sudermann's _Heimath_ at the Comédie Française, at which the Kaiser and his Staff were to be present. That chronically disappointed potentate was to reside, the German papers of the time declared, at the Élysée, the President's abode, while the procuresses of Paris, mostly Germans, felt, in view of the commissions already distributed in advance among them, emphatically assured that their financial millennium was to arrive with the German Staff. It had even been arranged, by way of a spectacular _revanche_, that the so-called War Lord was to visit the Invalides, where Napoleon's body reposes, and there possess himself of the great soldier's sword, as the Corsican had, in 1806, possessed himself of the sword of Frederick the Great, saying as he took it, "Ceci est à moi"—this is mine. The military set-back was in all probability the least which the Emperor William suffered by his failure to "hit" Paris as a Westerner might put it, seeing that the Kaiser can hardly be called a military man in any practical sense of the term. In regard to the fixed spies in Belgium, it has to be noted that they were not all, as far as is known, natives. Competent Belgian journalists declared at the outbreak of the present war that, at the defeat of France in the war of 1870, Germany had already laid down plans for eventually overrunning and annexing both Belgium and Holland. With a view to carrying out her plans, she made in 1872 definite appropriations for the covering of both countries with a system of what was known at Berlin as "Germanising influences." It was based on a principle of giving to deserving minor tradesmen in the Rhineland districts sums of money sufficient to set them up in business in the so-called Belgian "penetration area." Preference was given to couples with young children who had been born on German soil. The people of the Rhineland and Westphalia are for the most part Catholics; large numbers of them speak both French and Flemish, or at least "Plat-Deutsch," while from a mental point of view, there is very little difference between them and the populations of Liège and Limburg. Once settled on Belgian soil, it was easy for them to adapt themselves to the people and bring up their children as Belgians. It was part of the agreement, however, that the children, after attaining a certain age, should return to the Fatherland, there to undergo a process of re-Germanisation, at the close of which, having resided with close relatives and passed through German schools, they returned to Belgium ostensibly pro-Germans. In the meantime their parents were being helped to enrich themselves by acting as commission-agents for large industrial houses on the German side. It was supposed that this scheme—an invention of Bismarck—would prove the key to the conquest of the Netherlands, for the plans were also put into operation in Holland. As a matter of fact, the results of the scheme were far from