Renan has declared that, to the honour of France, it has ever been found impossible to discover a traitor in her hour of trial. On the whole this statement may be taken as representing the truth, and in flagrant cases in which French citizens have been proved to have betrayed their country, it has almost invariably been proved that the offenders were of German origin.
In order properly and fully to understand the nature of the German system of spying, it is essential that we go down to fundamentals. The principles on which it is based may be said to have their roots in the character of the Germans themselves and that character has been largely developed by a special type of ethical education, the lines of which were to a great extent conceived by Frederick the Great as especially applicable to the qualities of his people, and subsequently elaborated into a kind of national philosophy by writers like Nietzsche, Treitschke, Bernhardi and others, all of whom were the leaders of that extreme pragmatical school of which we have spoken. Frederick, it may be said, was like his descendant[1] of to-day, William the Second, a man who outwardly professed religious principles and held the view that Religion is absolutely necessary in a State government. In the famous _Matinées du Roi de Prusse_, published in 1784, the Prussian monarch is made, however, to say that the value of religion for the people consists mainly in the fact that it enables their rulers to hold them more completely in subjection. For a King to have any religion whatsoever is, he is also said to have declared, a very unwise policy, and for the reason, he adds, that "if a King fears God, or more exactly, if he fears a future punishment, he becomes a greater bigot than any monk. If a favourable opportunity presents itself of taking forcible possession of a neighbouring province, immediately an army of demons seems to him ready to defend it; he is weak-minded enough to think he is going to commit an injustice and he proportions the punishment of his crime to the extent of his evil designs. When he is about to conclude a treaty with some foreign power, all is lost if he stops to remember that he is a Christian, for by doing so, he will always suffer himself to be duped and imposed upon."