ewspaper paragraph. It appeared that he
was a great statistician. He had been appointed by the Governments
of Canada and the United States jointly to prepare a "statistical
survey of Europe," whatever that may mean. I was sent down to call
upon him somewhere in the Temple, and I was to get him to talk
about his statistics.

But after my introduction he shut the door carefully and, with an air of
anxious inquiry through his gold-rimmed spectacles, asked a strange
question:

"Are you an honest young man and a good patriot?"

I could produce no credentials for honesty or patriotism, but hoped
that I might not fail in either.

"I suppose you have come to talk to me about my statistics," he said.

I admitted that this was my mission.

"They are unimportant," he said, "compared with what I have to tell
you. I am going to talk to you about Germany. The English people
ought to know what I have learnt during a year's experience in that
country, where I have lived all the time in the company of public
officials. Sir, it seems to me that the English people do not know that
the entire genius of intellectual Germany is directed to a war against
England. It dominates their thoughts and dreams, and the whole
activity of their national intelligence."

For an hour the little bald-headed man spoke to me of all he had
heard and learnt of Germany's enmity to England during twelve
months in official circles. He desired to give this information to an
English newspaper of standing and authority. He thought the English
people had a right to know.

I went back to my office more disturbed than I cared to admit even to
myself. There had been a kind of terror in the voice of the little man
who had found time for other interests besides his "statistical survey
of Europe." It seemed that he believed himself in the possession of
an enormous and terrible secret threatening the destiny of our
Empire. Yet nobody would believe him when he told it, however
fervently. My editor would not believe him, and none of his words
were published, in my paper or any other. But sometimes I used to
remember him and wonder whether perhaps in all such warnings that
came to us there were not a horrible truth which one day, when
brutally revealed, would make a mockery of all those men in England
who pooh-poohed the peril, and of the idealists who believed that
friendly relations with Germany could be secured by friendly words.
Meanwhile the Foreign Office did n