Grant Hamil. Spies and Secret Service; The Story of Espionage, its Main Systems and Chief Exponents

New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1915. — 338 p.The worldly philosophy of the current age bears the name of Pragmatism, the principles of which, so far as they are susceptible of being weighed, constitute a more or less modified view of the doctrine that the end justifies the means, a teaching which has become familiar to us through the pages of Nietzsche and Stendhal, and which is based mainly on the idea that might is the proper measure of right. Taking it, then, that prag- matical notions of this sort have become almost an implicit condition of individual progress, it would seem to serve little purpose seriously to go into the question of the wrongfulness or the rightfulness of spying as a factor in the struggle for complete self-expression - itself the real aim of all ordered and prearranged lives. It is sufiicient for us to reflect that the successful spy flourishes to-day, as he has flourished since the beginnings of recorded time, and as in all probability he will continue to flourish till the day of doom. Indeed, it is not an unreasonable presumption that in the very earliest ages of the world, espionage must have been an entirely necessary condition of the struggle for existence among the inframen who then peopled the caves of the earth and who succeeded in successfully surviving only by virtue of predatory acts and excursions in which the spoils and the plunder went to the strongest, who had also made themselves the best-informed as to sources of supply. Bible history, too, has told us about the Spy. The story of Joshua, the leader of Israel's hosts and the excellent organisation of informers which he controlled, remain like other tales of common human interest in the Scriptures among those that linger always in the minds of the least Biblical of students. Babylon, we are told, was overrun with informers of all kinds, Memphis and Thebes in their turn became what Alexandria proved to be in the time of Tiberius, and what the great capitals of our own day have become - namely, recruiting centres for criminal adventurers of all types, nationaUties and classes, and consequently happy hunting-groimds for all in rapid quest of the agents of intrigue, iniquity and maleficence. Those, too, who have read the classical writers will remember that great leaders like Alexander, Mithridates, Scipio, Hannibal, Pompey and Caesar, laid the foundations of successful campaigns and political achievement upon information previously suppUed them by commissioned spies.