Page:The web (1919).djvu/117

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of airplane tanks for the duration of the war—and longer.

Of all the individual spies located in America, one of the most noted and most able was that Dr. Scheele elsewhere mentioned as a Brooklyn druggist. Dr. Scheele was taken in Cuba by the United States Government after he had fled the country just ahead of the hounds. This accomplished student and practitioner of villainy was one of the finest chemists Germany ever produced—a descendant of a family of chemists. He was a major in the German army. That this man had intellect is beyond any question—he had more than that; he had genius. He was one of the finest examples of the great development in Germany of commercial chemistry. Men such as he have rendered services valuable beyond any price in almost all ranks of commerce, and Germany's military orders were to get them at any price, all of them, for German-controlled concerns. Such men have helped give Germany her tremendous and powerful place in the commerce of the world. This unique genius in research, this ability to divine elemental secrets, allied with the hard working, abstemious, thrifty, free-breeding traits of the German people, made that nation very strong in her position among the world forces.

But here again comes in the proof of the assertion made in regard to the debased activities of the German nature, not only in its emotional manifestations but in its intellectual processes at well. Perhaps the one thought which will awaken the bitterest resentment and the most long-*lived[found long-untroubled and long deferred] suspicion in the American mind against the German citizen is the revelation of the fact that German spies lived among us so long as accepted citizens, made their business successes here, profited by our free-handed generosity, while all the time they were agents of Germany and traitors to the United States.

In the preceding chapter, reference was made to some of these long-term spies, as they may be called—men who were sent out on their iniquitous missions even in time of peace. The best known of these men is Scheele, who, when apprehended, was trying to get to Europe. Now he is hugging the deputy U. S. marshal in whose custody he is,