"No. 692, March 20.

"With reference to telegram No. 685 please advise our Minister in Berne that some one will call on him who will give him the password Sanct Regis who wished to establish relations with the Foreign Office. Intermediary further requests that influence may be brought to bear in France so far as possible in silence so that things may not be spoiled by German approval.

"(Signed) Bernstorff."

Von Bernstorff had been cautious enough during Bolo's sojourn in the United States to negotiate with him only through Pavenstedt, in order that the Embassy might not be compromised in an exceedingly hazardous undertaking if any suggestion of Bolo's real designs leaked out. He was fully prepared in such an event to repudiate Pavenstedt, and to state honestly that he had never seen or heard of Bolo, for until the day before he left, when Pavenstedt asked the Ambassador for the telegram of introduction quoted above, Bernstorff did not know Bolo's name. That he did know it then, and that he discussed Bolo with Berlin during April and May is evident from the following cable, sent from the Foreign Secretary to the Embassy at Washington on May 31:

"Number 206. May 31st. The person announced in telegram 692 of March 20th has not yet reported himself at the Legation at Berne. Is there any more news on your side of Bolo?

"Jagow."

There was not, although Bolo was keeping the cables hot with messages directing the further transfer of the nest-egg of $1,700,000 which he had acquired in his month in New York. He wanted the money credited to the account of Senator Humbert in J. P. Morgan & Co., then through Morgan, Harjes & Co. of Paris he directed the remittance of his funds to Paris, then cancelled those instructions and directed that his million be credited to him in Perrier & Cie., in which he was interested. What twists and turns of fate occasioned the juggling of these funds after he returned to France is not known, but certainly no bag of plunder ever passed through more artful manipulation. The explanation of its hectic adventures may lie in the fact that the spectacle of Bolo, commissioned to go to the United States to spend money for news print, and returning with nearly two millions of dollars, would have interested the French police.

For more than a year he covered his tracks. Shortly after his return the Bonnet Rouge, the declining publication which served ex-Premier Joseph Caillaux as mouthpiece, began to attract attention for its discussion of peace propaganda. A strain of pessimism over the conduct of the war began to make itself apparent in other journals. The arrest of Duval and Almereyda of the Bonnet Rouge disclosed certain of Bolo's activities and a search of his house in February revealed papers covering certain of his financial transactions in America. The United States was requested to investigate, and refused, as the affair was considered political, and it was not until we joined France in the war that the request was repeated, this time with better success.

Attorney-General Merton Lewis of New York State conducted an investigation which revealed every step of Bolo's operations in New York. His search of the records of the banks involved indicated that a fund of some $50,000,000 in cash and negotiable securities lay on deposit in America which the Deutsches Bank could place at the disposal of von Bernstorff and his fellow conspirators at any time for any purpose, and which was adequate as a reserve for any enterprise which might present itself. The evidence against Bolo was forwarded to Paris, and he was arrested. On October 4, 1917, Secretary Lansing made public the correspondence which the State Department had intercepted.

The French public became hysterically interested in the case. Senator Humbert promptly refunded the 5,500,000 francs which he had received from Bolo for 1,600 shares in Le Journal. Almereyda of the Bonnet Rouge committed suicide in prison; his death dragged Malvy, Minister of the Interior under Ribot, out of office under suspicion of trading with the enemy; the editor of a Paris financial paper was imprisoned on the same charge; "Boloism" became a generic term, and the French government, feeling a growing restlessness on the part of the public, encouraged the new diversion of spy-hunting which resulted in the exposure of negotiations between Caillaux and German representatives in Buenos Aires. Russia had been dissolved by similar German propaganda, Italy, after vigorous advances into Italia Irridenta, had had her military resistance sapped by another such campaign as Bolo proposed for France, and had retreated to the Po valley; the sum total of "Boloism" during the autumn and winter of 1917-1918 was an increased conviction on the part of the Allied peoples that the line must be held more firmly than ever, while the rear was combed for prominent traitors.

Thus, a year before she entered war, the United States supplied the scene of one of the outstanding intrigues of the war. How voluble was Adolph Pavenstedt in confessing his services as intermediary for the Kaiser; Pavenstedt was interned in an American prison camp ... a rather comfortable camp. Hugo Schmidt, who on his own testimony was the accredited manipulator of enormous sums for the German government, was ingenuous to a degree in his denial of any knowledge of what the money paid Bolo was to be used for; Schmidt was interned. Bolo was shot.

Revolution in India, a battle royal on the Central American isthmus, a revolution in Mexico, uprisings in the West Indies, a separate peace in France—these were ambitious undertakings. For three years they were cleared through Washington, D. C. We must accept that fact not alone with the natural feeling of chagrin which it evokes, but with an eye to the future. We should congratulate our smug selves that our country was concerned only with the processes of these intrigues, and was not subject directly to their results. And then we Americans should ask ourselves whether it is not logical that, our country having served as the most fertile ground for German demoralization of other nations, we should be on our guard for a similar plot against ourselves.