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300 attaché of a secret service bureau should have some recognized rights, which even the enemy would be bound to respect.

I admit that there are difficulties in the way of any such arrangement as this; for, from the peculiar manner in which a spy carries on his operations, it is often necessary that he should be known to be what he is to no one but his confidential superior, and in the prosecution of some of the most important enterprises it is impossible for him to carry about him, in any shape, evidences of who or what he is ; still, something might be done to improve the barbarous methods now in vogue of dealing with military detectives ; for it is preposterous to attempt to regard them in the light of outlaws, when they are acting as much under the orders of responsible superiors as are the men who shoulder the muskets.

Having been for a long period a spy myself, and a very successful one, arid having been engaged in many as hazardous and responsible enterprises as usually fall to the lot of a secret agent of a belligerent power, I naturally feel a, so to speak, professional interest in this matter. Otherwise, however, it does not concern me personally what may be done, or left undone, in the way of organizing the detective forces of the armies of the future. I am well out of the business, with a consciousness of having served the cause I advocated with zeal and efficiency; and as I did not fear danger while engaged in secret service duty, so I feel no compunctions in relating the particulars of a number of transactions which, at first sight, the reader may think were not to my credit. All I ask is, that fair-minded persons, who will do me the honor to peruse this portion of my narrative, will remember that the circumstances were not ordinary ones. I was mixed up in a good deal of most rascally business; but it was my associates, and not myself, who were deserving of condemnation. Their motive was gain, and gain at the expense of a government and people that trusted them, and to the detriment of a cause which they professed to hold sacred. I, on the other hand, was the secret agent of the enemy, who considered that pretty much anything was fair in war, and that I was justified in inflicting all the damage to the enemies of my cause that I was able, whether by fighting them with arms in my hands in the open field, or by encouraging treason within their own ranks. That I associated with traitors, and strove to make men betray the cause to which they were bound by every tie of honor and