The American Spy Trial It is a tradition of British
justice that any man is presumed innocent till he is proved guilty, and British public opinion will be content, in accordance with that principle, to wait with suspended judgement for the outcome of the sensational spy trial about to open in the United States. But it can hardly. be supposed that the Department of Justice would have taken a step which practically involves the indictment of a foreign government without the certainty that the evidence in its hands was sufficient to secure a conviction. Every Government maintains an " intelligence " service whose business it is to get what information it can about other countries' armaments, - and the best that can be said of the system is that it is a necessary evil which only limitation of and publicity about armaments will end. But it is fair to say that the activities of German intelligence agents bear much the same relation to those of the agents of other countries as the secret police do to the recognised police forces of other countries. America has not forgotten the sabotage for which German agents were responsible in the United States in the early years of the War, when the United States was neutral, and the new disclosures, unless they are effectively rebutted, may be counted on to widen very considerably the rift which already exists between America and Germany.
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