On the passing of Constantine to the Bosporus in the fourth century, Rome, in the process of the ages, became the centre of a vast ecclesiastical power. The work of the spy then reached the honours of a kind of consecration. Writers like Lachesnaie and Deville emphasise the view that ecclesiastics are especially fitted for the business of spying. Fouché and Talleyrand had been clerics in their early days and certainly both were masters in the business of organising special-information corps. In his works, too, the Prussian General, Karl von Decker, declares that "a secret which cannot be penetrated by a woman or a priest will never be penetrated." To tell the story of Church espionage would exhaust the capacity of a large library, and in this connection it may be said that adversaries of the Church of Rome have ever held that the Confessional was a purely political invention, the object of which was to spy upon the community. Whether this be so or not, it is fortunately not our business to decide; it is fair, however, to mention the prevalence of the view. In any case, clerics have ever proved themselves apt for the work of espionage, and in a collection of ordinances issued and signed by Louis XIV. in 1652, a certain Father Berthoud, "although an ecclesiastic, is authorised to disguise himself in any way he likes in Paris, Bordeaux, Blaye and elsewhere," for the purposes of spy work among the political and social enemies of the Crown. Cardinal Richelieu and his understudy, Père Joseph, practically inaugurated in France the system of opening private communications, a practice which was carried to its extreme under Napoleon, of whose daily budget of private letters, his fourth secretary, Fain, has told us much. That the system of espionage persists to our own day in Continental colleges and convents under the control of congregational clerics, is a fact which is well known. Each division of a school is invariably placed under the chronic vigilance of a "surveillant," or watcher, who in his turn employs his own corps of spies, privileged boys moving among the masses of their congeners, marking their intentions, noting the relations of the younger boys with the older, getting information as to unlawful programmes to be carried out, ferreting out secret testimony as to the habits of suspect characters and, if possible, intercepting amorous billets which pass between elder boys in other divisions and the younger fry. In regard to these unwholesome _liaisons_ the vigilance of the spies is certainly justified; but the system goes much deeper than this in foreign schools, its objects being to inquire into the most intimate details regarding the private character of a boy—heaven only knows why, if it is not for the pure love of finding out. Indeed, it must be allowed that the baser tendencies which are to be noted in the case of all spies, here display themselves in the form of a pruriency which often touches the indecent and always the unwholesome.