Those who label Stieber as "von" in speaking of him are about on a level with any who would choose to confer on Crippen, of unlamented memory, the title of baronet, for the two pretensions are about equal, so far as right to them is concerned. Karl Stieber was born at Mersebourg, a town of Saxony in Prussia, in the year 1818. His parents were people of the middle class, good and inconspicuous Prussians who destined their son for the profession of the law, in which he qualified as a barrister, but in which he achieved no distinction. It was not until 1847, when he was nearly thirty years of age, that Stieber first came to notice. In that year he obtained employment in the factory of Schoeffel Brothers in Silesia, where the Socialistic movement that has gained so great a hold on modern Germany was even then beginning. Stieber, seeming to throw in his lot with the workmen, was in reality waiting to see which way the cat would jump before he compromised himself beyond withdrawal from either side. In the meantime, he won the heart of a daughter of one of the directors of the firm, and displayed his abilities in the matter of espionage by compromising the other director--his future wife's uncle--in the Socialistic movement to such an extent that the unfortunate man was accused of plotting against the Government and inciting the workmen to revolt. By his denunciation of Schoeffel, who was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for acts which Stieber himself had committed, Stieber procured employ in the police service, entering the ranks of the revolutionary workmen ostensibly as one of the warmest adherents of the popular movement, but in reality its worst and most insidious enemy. In this guise he succeeded, in the course of popular and excited demonstrations in Berlin, in attracting the attention of Frederick William, the then King of Prussia. The year 1848 was a time of revolutionary movements, and Stieber chose the right side. When, in 1850, the Prussian Government began the measures of repression which have been continued in the case of the Socialist element down to the present day, Frederick William appointed Stieber to the post of _Polizierath_, a position in which he was superior to and beyond control of the Commissioner of Police.