rist has special
interest for a Hohenzollern who holds his kingship by divine grace,
and in the Emperor's case because his father had made the journey to
Jerusalem thirty years before. The Emperor, lastly, cannot but have
been glad to escape, if only for a time, such harassing concerns as
party politics, scribbling journalists, long-winded ministerial
harangues, and Social Democrats.

The journey of the Emperor and Empress to Palestine occupied about a
month from the middle of October, 1898, to the middle of the following
November, and while it was one of the most delightful and picturesque
experiences of the Emperor, it entailed some unforeseen and not
altogether agreeable consequences. It was very much criticized in
Germany as an exhibition of a theatrical kind, of the "decorative in
policy," as Bismarck used to say, who saw no utility in decoration,
and evidently did not agree with Shakspeare that the "world is still
deceived by ornament." It was objected that the Emperor should have
stayed at home to look after imperial business, that such a journey
must excite suspicion in England and France--in the former because
England is an Oriental power, and in the latter because France is
supposed to claim special protective rights over Christianity in the
East.

The Englishman who reads what German writers say about the journey
gets the impression that the criticism was an expression of
jealousy--jealousy, as we know from Bismarck and Prince Buelow, being a
national German failing. Every German ardently desires to see Italy
and the Orient, but until of late years few Germans had the means of
gratifying the wish. In one point, however, the critics were right.
The Emperor, when in Damascus, after saying that he felt "deeply moved
at standing on the spot where one of the most knightly sovereigns of
all times, the great Sultan Saladin, stood," went on to say that
Sultan Abdul "and the three hundred million Mohammedans who, scattered
over the earth, venerated him as their Caliph, might be assured that
at all times the German Emperor would be their friend." It was a
harmless and vague remark enough, one would think, but political
writers in all countries have made great capital out of it ever since
whenever Germany's Oriental policy is discussed. At the risk of
repetition it may be said that that policy is, in the East as
elsewhere, a purely economic one. The Emperor's mistake perhaps
chiefly lay in raising hopes in Turkish mi