bed with a great fat spider
at the centre and the threads along which the spider runs to thrust its
poisoned sting into the enmeshed butterfly is nature's most accurate
symbol of the vast web of espionage lying over North and South America
with secret threads that vibrated to the touch of the spider at the
centre named Berlin.

In that web thousands of German-Americans were enmeshed. The records of
our Secret Service concerning these German enemies of the American
Government read like a book of assassinations or like a history of the
black arts. When the whole story comes to be told it will horrify the
world.

The quality of the German-Americans that Berlin bribed is set forth in
the reminiscences of Witte when he says that the Kaiser and the Foreign
Department paid Munsterberg of Harvard University $5,000 a year salary
and that Munsterberg was the most successful and efficient spy that the
German system had ever developed.

In the long list of German agents are to be found the names of
German-American bankers who received secret decorations and medals from
the German Government; of German merchants who were partners in this
country of firms in the Fatherland and were bribed by a ribbon and an
invitation to the Potsdam Palace; of German newspaper men who were under
German pay, and, most amazing of all, among the papers seized in the
office of a German Consul was found a commission appointing this Consul
in an American city to the office of Governor-General of one of the
greatest States of Canada as soon as Canada became a German colony.

Many of the threads from Berlin ran into the various cities of Mexico. A
German head office was set up under the general direction of Zimmermann
in Berlin and of von Bernstorff in Washington. Certain large
institutions that did business in Mexico, working in the same field,
were quietly elbowed out of Mexico, and an American company, ostensibly
American, but controlled by Germans, took over the business of the other
firms under special arrangement with Mexico. Pledges were given Mexico
that as soon as Germany had reduced Canada and the United States to the
position of German colonies, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and
California should be handed back to the Mexicans.

Millions were spent by the German Foreign Office as ordinary men spend
dollars. The German spies, like Boy-Ed and von Papen, arranged to blow
up American munition factories and held dinners waiting for a telepho