by a vast network of espionage, were everywhere overwhelming, and again during the times of Napoleon's military empire, a contrast in conditions which suggests the idea that governments which are based on autocratic or non-representative principles invariably require the help of intrinsically corrupt and vicious influences to enable them to maintain their existence. For all the lauded excellence of the imperial German organisation of spies, that of France may be said, when we take into consideration the lighter political and social machinery of a Republican country, to be hardly less comprehensive, as well as quite as effective in its results. Paris is, of course, the centre of the French organisation. Here it works craftily and silently and though rarely coming into contact with the work of the President or his Cabinet, is permanently in touch with departmental officials in all the great public offices. It is declared on the authority of a now-retired divisional chief of the French secret service, Saint-Just, that even the Prefect of Police in Paris only rarely hears of the business details of his own department, though it is very doubtful if such a statement could be made about M. Méline, whose omnivorous activities and private information during his tenure of that office are said on more than one occasion to have extricated the Republic from a difficult international impasse. As a rule the divisional chiefs of the system only invite the attention of the titular head of the service in the event of a _cause célèbre_ in which great names are mentioned, or else in cases in which international complications, as in the Dreyfus drama, are to be feared. The French Secretary for Foreign Affairs can alone be said, in regard to the work and the results of the French spy system, to be in close touch with it; and in all certainty this was true about M. Delcassé in the perilous period of the Moroccan imbroglio of 1906. Other Ministers, all of whom, like the Prefect of Police himself, hold office by virtue of their being party men, know as a rule less about what is taking place in the underground of political movements than much humbler civil servants. The divisional chiefs without doubt are the real controllers of the police organisation; these men are practically irremovable and they are invariably so well acquainted with inside working of state affairs that no Government dares dismiss one of them without grave reason. Colonel Henry, whose momentous knowledge of the real motives which underlay the Dreyfus affair made his own removal by suicide or murder—who can tell which?—an insistent necessity, had acted as a go-between from a divisional chief to an important political personage in France and consequently learned, in the course of his dealings with them both, that formidable secret which eventually cost the Colonel his life.