Note 1 — 1. GERMANY (continued 2)

A German statistician objected to this description of the Imro system on the ground that the second to the last man would know that it was the last man who was delegated to kill him if necessary; and the last man would not have a gun in his back. True enough mathematically, but the Imro system was run by practical assassins, not mathematicians. They never let it get to the last man; the existence of the chain, incomplete though it had to be, guaranteed that the originally appointed assassin performed his duty.