Secret Service—Whenever one sees a photograph of President Roosevelt outside the White House, one is sure to see several members of the Secret Service in the picture. To protect the President and his family is one of their prin-ipal duties, Besides this, they watch for counterfeiters and forgers of government cheques.
Bureau of Internal Revenue Intelligence Unit.—These men are mostly lawyers and expert accountants who protect Uncle Sam against income-tax evaders, Besides the detective agencies in the Treasury Department, there are two others in other departments. Post Office Inspectors.—There are more than 500 persons in this agency. In the first place, they are responsible for the postal service. Besides this, they are on the look-out for mail robbers, fraudulent schemes by mail, and embezzling postal employees, Immigration Border Patrol.—This is a part of the Labour Department. The members take posts at the principal ports and ride the borders of Canada and Mexico. Their job is to prevent aliens from coming into the country illegally.
Uncle Sam's detective agencies, like many other agencies of Government, were not carefully planned from the beginning. Like Topsy, they "just grew." This explains why there are so many, why they are in different departments, and why their work sometimes overlaps.
Altogether there are over 16,000 federal officers who do detective work. They are all highly trained, and each has been trained for work in his own special field. First, a new, man spends one to six months in a service school. Then he spends between three months and a year more in the field under an experienced instructing agent. He is not finally accepted until he passes stiff examinations satisfactorily.
In all the detective agencies, Uncle Sam de-vends very little on luck, Training and tenacity are what bring results. Uncle Sam spends £10,000,000 on these agencies each year to save the United States many times that amount.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.