New and still more stringent powers for dealing with espionage were given by the Defense of the Realm act, which was passed by the Home Secretary through the House of Commons and received the Royal Assent on Aug. 8.  Orders in council have been made under this act which prohibit, in the widest possible terms, any attempt on the part either of aliens or of British subjects to communicate any information which “is calculated to be or might be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy”; and any person offending against this prohibition is liable to be tried by court-martial and sentenced to penal servitude for life.  The effect of these orders is to make espionage a military offense.  Power is given both to the police and to the military authorities to arrest without a warrant any person whose behavior is such as to give rise to suspicion, and any person so arrested by the police would be handed over to the military authorities for trial by court-martial.  Only in the event of the military authorities holding that there is no prima facie case of espionage or any other offense triable by military law is a prisoner handed back to the civil authorities to consider whether he should be charged with failing to register or with any other offense under the Aliens Restriction act.

The present position is therefore that espionage has been made by statute a military offense triable by court-martial.  If tried under the Defense of the Realm act the maximum punishment is penal servitude for life; but if dealt with outside that act as a war crime the punishment of death can be inflicted.

At the present moment one case is pending in which a person charged with attempting to convey information to the enemy is now awaiting his trial by court-martial; but in no other case has any clear trace been discovered of any attempt to convey information to the enemy, and there is good reason to believe that the spy organization crushed at the outbreak of the war has not been re-established.

How completely that system had been suppressed in the early days of the war is clear from the fact disclosed in a German Army order—­that on the 21st of August the German military commanders were still ignorant of the dispatch and movements of the British expeditionary force, although these had been known for many days to a large number of people in this country.

The fact, however, of this initial success does not prevent the possibility of fresh attempts at espionage being made, and there is no relaxation in the efforts of the Intelligence Department and of the police to watch and detect any attempts in this direction.  In carrying out their duties the military and police authorities would expect that persons having information of cases of suspected espionage would communicate the grounds of the suspicion to local military authority or to the local police, who are in direct communication with the Special Intelligence Department, instead of causing unnecessary public alarm and possibly giving warning to the spies by public speeches or letters to the press.  In cases in which the Director of Public Prosecutions has appealed to the authors of such letters and speeches to supply him with the evidence upon which their statements were founded in order that he might consider the question of prosecuting the offender, no evidence of any value has as yet been forthcoming.