Modern spies of the professional type, more especially those employed by Germany, fully meet the specifications of Napoleon's idea of the race. The accomplished spy of to-day is invariably a man of at least quasi-criminal proclivities, a being entirely lacking in a moral sense, a degenerate briefly; and indeed experts in the secret history of the German special-information departments all agree in declaring that a "white man," to use an Americanism, is worse than useless to the experts at the chief bureau of the Berlin Secret Service. As a consequence, their _corps d'élite_ is mostly made up of men who, if they have not known the inside of prisons, have at least earned an unequivocal right to such knowledge. One of the profoundest technicians in the business of organising spy campaigns, the late Karl Stieber, has stated that the most valuable spy is your born aristocrat with a bad record and a worse reputation. Proof of the soundness of this view would seem to have been fully advanced by the noble interveners in the Dreyfus case, and, in any event, it is known that among the names of the organising staff of Berlin's school for spies, a large number are those who bear the names of famous families, while the remainder, if not all gentlemen by birth, are at least gentlemen by act of parliament, as the saying is. Courage, _aplomb_, the possession of what Americans so aptly term "a good front," easy manners and a genial temperament—of any or all of these qualifications, a man of good birth is only in rare cases devoid. Heredity alone has given him many of the psychic requirements that go to make up the most valuable of actors in a desperate situation, including, perhaps, that philosophy of absolute _insouciance_ which makes of him the most sinister and cold-blooded of all criminal agents.
It would be unfair, however, to accuse the Germans of monopolising all those vicious characteristics which go to form the complete spy. Indeed, it would probably be nearer the mark to declare that it is only because of the elaborate excellence of the German organisation that the Teuton has signalised himself so prominently these later times in espionage. For, in truth, the Teutonic mind is fundamentally lacking, it is well known, in those qualities of craft and imagination which produce the best kind of secret service agent. Perseverance and the philosophy which knows how to wait on circumstances, these conventional enough qualities he undoubtedly possesses in a marked degree above his fellows. Nevertheless, they are not the most important requirements of the master-spy, whose base diplomacy and its results must depend to a great extent upon the exercise of constructive imagination and the forcing of circumstances to suit his particular strategy. The German has excelled his congeners at the business in the opinion of modern men solely for the reason that among the Germans the trade of the spy is not accounted more dishonourable than any other. In all probability, however, the Italian, the Greek, the Kelt, given a highly systematised school and an equal ethical standpoint, would prove abler executants in any mission which called for the employment of deep-set guile, the power of divining motives and the ability to calculate the effect of moves. The essential arts of the diplomatist—has not an ambassador been described as an official spy?—underlie, in respect of the mental operations required, the work of your successful secret service agent, and although men like Bismarck, whose mentality was not of a positively Teutonic cast, may be cited in disproof of the statement, it is certain that the German mind is less adapted and less adaptable to the fine processes of the arts of political negotiation than that of either the Kelt or the Italian.