s widespread system of counter-espionage comes in. There is not
a trade union, among all the eighteen or twenty engaged in shipyard
work--riveters, fitters, platers, joiners, and all the rest of
them--in which he has not police officers enrolled as skilled
tradesmen, members of the unions, working as ordinary hands or as
foremen, sometimes even in office as "shop stewards" representing the
interest of the unions and acting as their spokesmen in disputes with
the employers. Dawson claims that there has never yet been a secret
Strike Committee, since the war began, upon which at least one of his
own men was not serving. He is a wonderful man. I don't like him; he
is too unscrupulous and merciless for my simple tastes; but his value
to the country is beyond payment."

"But where in the world does he raise these men? One can't turn a
policeman into a skilled worker at a moment's notice. How is it done?"

"He begins at the other end. All his skilled workmen are the best he
can pick out of their various trades. They have served their full time
as apprentices and journeymen. They are recommended to him by their
employers after careful testing and sounding. Most of them, I believe,
come from the Government dockyards and ordnance factories. They are
given a course of police training at Scotland Yard, and then dropped
down wherever they may be wanted. Dawson, and inspectors like him,
have these men everywhere--in shipyards, in shell shops, in gun
factories, in aeroplane sheds, everywhere. They take a leading part in
the councils of the unions wherever they go, for they add to their
skill as workmen a pronounced, even blatant parade of loyalty to the
interests of trade unions and a tasty flavour of socialist principles.
Dawson is perfectly cynically outspoken to me over the business which,
I confess, appals me. In his female agents--of which he has many--he
favours what he calls a 'judicious frailty'; in his male agents he
favours a subtle skill in the verbal technique of anarchism. And this
man Dawson is by religion a Peculiar Baptist, in private life a
faithful husband and a loving father, and in politics a strict Liberal
of the Manchester School! As a man he is good, honest, and rather
narrow; as a professional detective he is base and mean, utterly
without scruple, and a Jesuit of Jesuits. With him the end justifies
the means, whatever the means may be."

"And yet you admit that his value to the country is beyond payment.
D