look out for fresh discoveries. They
established a regular office of secret police at the Prussian Embassy
in London. A police agent, Greif by name, held his odious vocation
under the title of an attache to the Embassy--a step which should
suffice to put all Prussian embassies out of the pale of international
law, and which even the Austrians have not yet dared to take. Under
him worked a certain Fleury, a merchant in the city of London, a man
of some fortune and rather respectably connected, one of those low
creatures who do the basest actions from an innate inclination to
infamy. Another agent was a commercial clerk named Hirsch, who,
however, had already been denounced as a spy on his arrival. He
introduced himself into the society of some German Communist refugees
in London, and they, in order to obtain proofs of his real character,
admitted him for a short time. The proofs of his connection with the
police were very soon obtained, and Herr Hirsch, from that time,
absented himself. Although, however, he thus resigned all
opportunities of gaining the information he was paid to procure, he
was not inactive. From his retreat in Kensington, where he never met
one of the Communists in question, he manufactured every week
pretended reports of pretended sittings of a pretended Central
Committee of that very conspiracy which the Prussian police could not
get hold of. The contents of these reports were of the most absurd
nature; not a Christian name was correct, not a name correctly spelt,
not a single individual made to speak as he would be likely to speak.
His master, Fleury, assisted him in this forgery, and it is not yet
proved that "Attache" Greif can wash his hands of these infamous
proceedings. The Prussian Government, incredible to say, took these
silly fabrications for gospel truth, and you may imagine what a
confusion such depositions created in the evidence brought before the
jury. When the trial came on, Herr Stieber, the already mentioned
police officer, got into the witness-box, swore to all these
absurdities, and, with no little self-complacency, maintained that he
had a secret agent in the very closest intimacy with those parties in
London who were considered the prime movers in this awful conspiracy.
This secret agent was very secret indeed, for he had hid his face for
eight months in Kensington, for fear he might actually see one of the
parties whose most secret thoughts, words and doings, he pretended to