On the other hand Stieber had seen to it that as many hundreds of Alsatians and Lorrainers who were willing to enter his service should be employed by the French railway systems at the other side of the Frontier as _soi-disant_ Frenchmen. In accordance with their engagement to serve Stieber, they were paid at the rate of twenty-five per cent. of the wages they were drawing from their French employers, and until 1884 there were at least 1500 of them so serving both the French system and the German espionage bureau. In 1884 the French Government was roused to a realisation of the peril of allowing these men to work on their railroads, and they were rapidly removed. It is on record that in 1880 Stieber had promised the old Emperor William that on the day on which Germany should again mobilise her armies, he himself could guarantee for the railways of France over 1000 trusted agents who were prepared, by destroying locomotives and other railroad stock, to paralyse the French mobilisation to the Frontier in such a way that German armies should have fairly approached the capital before the Republic had got her forces decisively in hand.
In regard to the second part of his programme—namely, that which was to create factions, unrest and revolutionary conditions in countries which were to become the objects of German military aggression—Stieber developed the ideas which still hold good in the plans of the German Secret Service. The main principle underlying his plan of campaign was the fomenting of industrial disorders. In each case a literary propaganda was to precede action, which was first to be undertaken by trained spies and _agents provocateurs_ who were capable, by the common methods of political and industrial agitators, of promoting class antipathies. German enterprise in this respect has not been confined to France, but has been active in every country in Europe, including England. In 1893 the successor of Bismarck, Count Caprivi, signed an appropriation of £4000 for the purposes of "providing foreign pamphlets and publications useful to the policy of the Empire." In later years the sum was increased to £20,000, while a number of paid agitators, inciting the great industrial centres of France, of Belgium, of Russia and (it is recorded) of England, is said to have drawn large sums from the German funds. The recent epidemic of industrial strikes in France, Russia and England is declared to have been fomented by paid agitators working on behalf of German authorities—some of them unconsciously, and as a result of the influence exerted by publications which had been subsidised by German gold. There are French writers who still maintain that the Dreyfus agitation was initiated and supported with the connivance of the highest military authorities in Berlin for the purpose of destroying one of the most potent forces in France—namely, belief and trust in the Army. Most of us, at all events, will recollect how towards the close of the momentous _Affaire_, when the Republic was already weakened by the series of national and international crises attending on the entire event, ominous threats of mobilisation were more than once made from Berlin. Again, the memorable Associations Bill, which enacted the disestablishment of the Church in France, was said to have owed its conception to German secret-service agents. To this movement—bound in any case to awaken the cupidity of venal politicians, in view of the vast Congregational possessions involved—succeeded the era of Syndicalist unrest, and finally the outbreak of the war of 1914. Nor can Englishmen forget that the so-called Agadir incident of the spring of 1911 coincided with one of the most devastating strikes Britain has yet known. In view of what we now know, there can hardly be a doubt that German plans and policies had meditated the paralysing of our transport system and our coal-supplies. Nor is there, again, the least possible doubt that for many years past German "philosophers," drawing pay from the secret-service funds, have been instructing British as well as French and Russian workmen in the art of combining "in defence of their rights" against the privileged classes. In Germany such revolutionary doctrines never leave the theoretical stage, nor could they do so, given the system of government which is in principle and practice hardly different from martial law.