It is certain that by 1848 he was already in touch with officials at the chief police bureau in Berlin, and traitor that he was, in order further to ingratiate himself with the Berlin authorities, Stieber persuaded his wife's uncle to enter into the Socialistic movement, the new recruit compromising himself so deeply by the violence of his radical opinions and utterances that, with Stieber's complicity, he was denounced, arrested and imprisoned on the ground that he was inciting the Silesians to revolt against the government. To have been a Socialist about 1850 was, it may be said, as bad as to have been an Anarchist in the last years of the nineteenth century, when that movement was at its height. The arrest of a relative through Stieber's instrumentality was accordingly a real earnest of his good disposition towards existing authority, and it was readily realised that in this recruit there was all the baseness and treachery which Berlin looked for in its officials. Stieber was summoned to Berlin, where he was given a commission in the secret police, with the duty of allying himself to the Socialist movement and reporting as to its progress, designs and machinations to headquarters in Berlin. Parenthetically, it may be observed, the German word _stieber_ is equivalent to our own term sleuth-hound, so that the spy was happy in his patronymic as well as mentally adapted for his traitorous trade. A writer has described him in the following terms:—"Herr Stieber is a man whose head, nose and ears suggest a Hebrew strain, although it is known that his father was a Gentile. There is in the general aspect of the face, and especially in the drawn lines of the mouth, much of that self-justifying hardness which is associated with the ideas given us of the Inquisition Fathers; his eyes are almost white in their colourlessness. With subordinates he adopts the loud airs of a master towards his slaves, and when in the presence of high authorities he is self-abasing and quiet of voice, wearing a smile of perennial oiliness and acquiescence, with much rubbing of the hands, a Jewish characteristic."