In the latter part of June, 1913, a federal judge named Emory Speer was
accused of evil deeds on the bench, and a congressional investigation
was announced. The judge was taken ill, and at this writing the
investigation still hangs fire. Now, the evidence against him had been
collected, it would appear, by the agency of government spies, and this
fact caused great indignation in some quarters. Here was a man not
convicted of felony, but a pillar of the state, being pursued by
detectives just as if for all the world he were an ordinary person--an
obscure private citizen, say, or an ex-convict! The judge himself was
very indignant, and his friends on the local press were rasping in their
comments. In a long editorial entitled "The Shadow of the Spy," one
Atlanta paper denounced the proceedings root and branch. It affirmed
that the governmental spy system had assumed such proportions during the
past few years as to threaten one of the mainstays of free government.
All this interested my comrades, not because the spy system was news to
them, but because no public notice had been taken of it until it began
to wring the withers of persons who had hitherto supposed themselves to
be in the position of promoters instead of victims of the practise. A
federal judge had never protested against pursuing with spies men
suspected of crimes, or men who, having served time upon conviction, had
then gone out into the world and attempted to lead a new life.
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