From the beginning of the war until its end the American public was constantly thrilled by the sensational and usually highly circumstantial accounts which appeared in the press, particularly the Sunday supplements, of the operations of German secret agents in the United States. Every one, I suppose, has heard, in some one of its many versions, the story of the German spy who was shot in the telephone-booth of a New York hotel by a Secret Service operative while giving a confederate information relative to the sailing of American transports. Though I have heard that story related, with minutest detail, in clubs, over dinner-tables, and in the smoking-compartments of Pullmans, I never heard any one ask the quite obvious questions as to why it was necessary for the operative to shoot the spy instead of taking him alive, or how the confederate proposed to transmit the information to Germany. One picturesque version of the story laid the scene in a crowded New York Subway train, the Secret Service man having his automatic in his pocket and firing through the cloth of his coat. Then there was the equally sensational story of the Hoboken family in whose employ was a German spy disguised as a maid of all work. One day she mysteriously disappeared, and a few hours after her disappearance Secret Service agents called at the house and searched the belongings she had left behind her. Their search was rewarded by discovering, under a false bottom in her trunk, a complete set of the plans of the defenses of New York harbor. Variations of that tale placed its locale in Stamford, Conn., in Chittenango, N. Y., in Newton Centre, Mass., in Key West, and in Los Angeles, while the papers discovered in the mysterious trunk ranged all the way from drawings of coast-defense guns to a copy of the German Naval Code. The same hysteria which led the public to accept these ridiculous concoctions at their face value, and to beg for more, caused them to suspect all sorts of well-known persons of being engaged in espionage activities—the general commanding a certain American division, a famous woman aviator, a still more famous prima donna, a Jewish banker noted for his philanthropies, the chancellor of a great university, and even the secretary to the President having been discovered—so the rumors had it—to be German spies. At one period of the war, indeed, it was popularly reported that spies were executed every morning at daybreak on Governor’s Island. Now I dislike to destroy illusions and to spoil perfectly good stories, but the dictates of truth compel me to assert that not a single spy was executed on Governor’s Island or anywhere else in the United States, though it is my personal opinion that a few such executions would have brought to an abrupt end the series of fires, explosions, strikes, and other cases of sabotage for which the agents of the Wilhelmstrasse were responsible. For stating this opinion, quite early in the war, at a