The Home Secretary, Sir W. Harcourt, made a speech at
the first annual festival of the Metropolitan and City Police Orphanage, held at Strawberry Hill last Saturday, in which he referred to the prejudice felt against the Detective system, the dislike of espionage ; and he said that espionage was quite fair, and even necessary, for a society that would defend itself against men who played against it with loaded dice, marked cards, and all the resources of the midnight marauder, the skulking assas- sin, and the secret society. This is, of course, true enough, but it does not make the functions of the men whose duty it is to get scoundrels to trust them, that they may betray that trust to people who are not scoundrels, at all the more agreeable or morally attractive. Is it conceivable that men whose great art it is to inspire bad men with unjustifiable confidence in their sympathy with badness, can feel themselves—or be—quite un- soiled by their duties ?
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