We have emphasised the German Spy System to the extent of devoting five chapters to an exposition of its methods and the principles underlying its origin, development and application. Our object has been mainly to show not only to what extent a nation may become demoralised by allowing a system of espionage to assume the proportions of a constitutional principle, but more especially to indicate how ineffective its operations must ultimately prove when opposed, not necessarily by counter-espionage, but by the ordinary legal safeguards which foreign governments can at all times put into force to neutralise such operations. At the outbreak of the War, for instance, the British authorities were able, by the simple process of internment and registration, to destroy in these islands the bulk of effective German influences on which Berlin had long relied for the consummation of its insane dream of "making Britain a German province." Again, the comparative ease with which eleventh-hour systems of counter-espionage have proved themselves capable of defeating the elaborate and far-flung organisations of fifty years of German master-spies must have the result of teaching Germany that a military establishment which puts its first trust in its external spy systems as providing the royal road to warlike successes, really admits its own lack of military genius. Indeed, it is impossible to read the story of Stieber's exploits and not realise that Stieber, rather than von Moltke, won those strategic successes of 1866 and 1870 which laid the foundations of the modern German Empire. And just as Bismarck has had no successor in the business of German diplomacy, so is it certain that Stieber's mantle has fallen upon no modern exponent of German espionage capable of adding to the original system. We have heard much of the triumphs of the Berlin Secret Service; the results of the War must disclose its total failure, though we may even now confidently predict that the blunders of its present directors have not been less glaring than those of Berlin diplomats. Like everything systematised in Germany, its organisation of espionage was systematised to the point at which independent and original action became impossible, so that when faced with conditions which Stieber had not known and provided for, it at once revealed its impotence and ineptitude, as well as the incapacity of its organisers for attaining practical results.