The passport frauds have long been “old stuff” in the American journals, and need be no more than referred to here. At the time German reservists were needed in the Old Country (there were more than a thousand very useful officers here who were much needed in the German army), the question of passports came up. These men could not get U. S. passports, so a general system of forged passports was set on foot in which the highest diplomatic officials of Germany in America did not scorn to take a hand. It was their idea of honorable service, one supposes. Certainly, von Bernstorff—whom we kept in this country long after he should have been kicked out—employed a go-between who arranged and carried on a very considerable traffic in foreign passports. The ordinary price was about twenty dollars,—small business, truly, for an ambassador, but von Bernstorff, von Papen, von Weddell, von Igel and others worked together in this thing until the Department of Justice men got too hot upon their trail. A long and intricate story hangs upon this. It is enough to say that the frauds were unearthed and the lower and middle class operatives in the frauds were put away. Von Weddell, the most important of these conspirators, took ship for Norway. However, the ship on which he sailed was sunk by a German U-boat,—tragic justice in at least one instance. Another of the well known German enterprises against England and her Indian empire was brought to light in the so-called Hindu Plot—also very well known through newspaper publication. It came to a focus in a trial in San Francisco, in which one Hindu leader shot another and was himself shot the next instant in the court room by a deputy marshal in attendance—a fact which perhaps lingers in the public memory even in these exciting days. The Hindu plot, reduced to its simple and banal lowest common denominator, consisted in a more or less useless intrigue with certain more or less uninfluential citizens of Hindu birth. One phase of the activities was the purchase with German money in New York of several hundred thousand rifles and several million cartridges, which were to be shipped in a vessel from the Pacific Coast to meet a certain other vessel far out in the Pacific for transfer of the cargo. That cargo was to be delivered where it would do the most good to any Hindu gentleman disposed to rise against the British authority. It is a long and rather dull story—how everything miscarried for our friends the Germans and the Hindus. The rifles never were delivered; the conspirators were brought to trial; the conspiracy was ended. And at the end, in a court room, and because he himself had a weapon in his hand, we got one Hindu Hun at least.