The enactment of the Union between England and Ireland led in its time to the commission of untold treacheries. Until within a score of years ago there stood in the private offices of Dublin Castle two iron-clamped chests filled to the top with papers relating to pre-Union days. These chests bore the Government seal and on them was inscribed the legend: "Secret and confidential—not to be opened." For close upon a century, these chests remained unexplored until, leave having been given for their examination, hundreds of betrayals and treacheries leapt to light. Men of the highest names, says Dr Fitzpatrick, in effect, were found to have been spies of the Government and practically _agents provocateurs_, although to the outer world they bore themselves as high-souled patriots of unimpeachable honour. The various causes in which these men served were not less filled with the foulness of secret crime than outwardly they proved to be fraught with deliberately constructed outrage and injustice to a whole nation. Coming down to more modern days, we seize upon the story of Major Le Caron. This man's adventure among the open and admitted enemies of England shows us the meagre extent to which our Government is prepared to subsidise its agents abroad. Le Caron is not singular in his criticism of the British authorities who, by a consistent policy of paying starvation pay, have reduced the secret service to the proportions of a vanishing quantity. Le Caron warned the authorities of their fatal and improvident parsimony in his time. "Some day," he said, "a big thing will happen about which there will be no leakage beforehand and then the affrighted and indignant British citizen will turn on his band of thirty secret-service men and rant and rave at them for their want of capacity and performance. The fault will be the want of a perfect system of secret service, properly financed. If plots are to be discovered in time, they can only be discovered through information coming from men associated with them. If it is to be made worth their while to speak, then the price offered by the British Government must be higher than that of the other paymasters." Le Caron's words are clearly based on the assumption that men enter into revolutionary movements rather for what there is in them, than from any spiritual or ethical motives. Until far more evidence than we possess is afforded us, we fear that the spy must be held to be right, for the tortuous path of political agitation is a path which is ever crowded with self-seekers and one on which the altruist is always the loneliest of pilgrims.