“The status of the spy in our own history cannot better be shown than in the fact that Nathan Hale, the spy of our own Revolution, whose impressive statue stands in New York and whose last words on the gallows were: ‘My chief regret is that I have but one life to give for my country,’ is one of the greatest of our national heroes. “Washington has been regarded always as one of the most scrupulous of men, but he did not hesitate to hold as a prisoner the British general Prescott, captured by Colonel Barton of the Rhode Island militia and a few men, all disguised as non-combatants, who penetrated the British lines under false colors. “Although the use of spies is not a violation of the laws of war, there are certain acts that are recognized as such and may be punished by death: The violation of the flag of truce; breaking a truce; violation of parole; the use of poison; killing of prisoners of war to prevent their recapture, and hoisting the hospital flag over a place not a hospital. But all these imply moral obliquity, and I have never heard of any one being rewarded or having a monument erected to him for having been guilty of any one of them. “The Filipinos are about the last people in the world who can question the ethics of entering the enemy’s lines in disguise. As a veteran of the war you know that, disguised as non-combatants, their officers and soldiers are among us all the time, and that if we had enforced the law strictly relative to spies we would have been hanging men all the time.” The halo of romance hovers in a special manner over women spies, and it is interesting to note that the United States furnishes the most conspicuous examples of this class in the persons of Belle Boyd, the Confederate girl who saved Stonewall Jackson; and Emma Edmonds, the Union spy, whose adventures could scarcely be duplicated in the pages of fiction. The story of a third American woman is related in this volume—Lydia Darrah, the gentle and brave Quakeress who saved Washington’s army from destruction. She was not a spy in the accepted sense of the word, and it would be impossible to imagine a greater contrast than is presented between the colonial girl and the two women of the Civil War, but the service she rendered the young and struggling nation cannot be overestimated. A book of this character would not be complete without the stories of Nathan Hale and Major André, the American and the Briton, each young and gallant, and each giving up his life for his country. In a general way, their exploits are familiar, yet it may be found that a new light has been turned upon certain phases of the sacrifices which they both so cheerfully made for the causes they represented.