Spies and Secret Service: The story of espionage, its main systems and chief exponentsGrant, Hamil
History
Spies and Secret Service: The story of espionage, its main systems and chief exponents
Grant, Hamil
Secret service; Spies
Le Caron, it is interesting to note, records his act of religious faith
in the following words:—"We are impelled by some unknown force to carry
out, not of our own volition or possible design, the work of this life,
indicated by a combination of circumstances to which unconsciously
we adapt ourselves." This, it may be remembered, was the religion of
the late Prince Bismarck, and it must be allowed that it is a highly
convenient and elastic hypothesis of life. It goes far to explain how
he came to be associated with Fenianism. Le Caron declares, however,
that he was far from having gone in search of the Fenians; on the
contrary, he insists, the Fenians came in search of Le Caron. The Major
disappoints us rather badly, nevertheless, by failing to show how it
was that the Irish in America, even in those days a powerful community,
should have sought out the psalmodical soldier who abhorred alcohol in
all its forms and possible quantities, and why he, a Briton, of all
men, should have been singled out to put life into the Irish-American
movement for the emancipation of the Sister Isle. At the head of that
movement in 1865 was James Stephens, who directed the organisation both
in Ireland and America, while his agents on American soil included
some of the shrewdest Irishmen of that age and, indeed, some of the
most prosperous. Le Caron explains briefly how he first entered the
movement as a spy. A fellow-officer had informed him quite casually
that the main object of the Irish-American agitation of that date
was the invasion of Canada. This startling bit of news proved more
than sufficient to call out the fires of the old puritanical moralist
dormant in the Major, who proceeds to inform us in the language of
tragic passion which one applies to a tailor who has omitted a minor
detail, that he "felt quite indignant at learning what was being done
against the interests of my native country." Accordingly, and in order
to unload his chest of the perilous secret, he addressed a letter
to his father, a local tradesman, at Colchester, informing the sire
that an attack was contemplated on the Dominion by a group of bold
bad Irishmen. Evidently there was in the Beach tribe a congenital
incapacity for holding a secret, for no sooner had the old man read his
son's letter than, "startled and dismayed at the tidings it conveyed,
he, true Briton that he was," made over the letter to the then sitting
member for Colchester, a Mr Rebow. It was this gentleman who was
instrumental in procuring Le Caron his salaried commission to act in
America as a spy for the British police authorities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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