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No. 41.

Vienna, 14th October 1898.

Second Year.

The Emperor's Journey to Jerusalem.

By O. Erter.

Emperor Wilhelm II. has set out upon the journey to the Orient whose goal is Jerusalem.

For six hundred and seventy years no German Emperor has tarried within the walls of Jerusalem. On the 18th of March 1229 the Hohenstaufen Friedrich II. set the crown of Jerusalem upon his head in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Friedrich came as the friend of the Sultan Al Kamil, in sharp discord with the Roman Pope; but in renouncing the conquest of the Holy Land he secured to Christendom, by treaty with the Sultan, the possession of Jerusalem and of the other holy places.

Memory involuntarily spins its threads back into that age of the greatest of the Hohenstaufen; but in the six hundred and seventy years which it traverses the ideals of mankind have become other than they were, and save in the personalities of the two Emperors, Friedrich II. and Wilhelm II., there is no resemblance between then and now. No Peter of Amiens goads kings and peoples to the crusade with his sermons of penance; the roads to the East are not filled with the wild clash of arms and the sultry strains of the crusaders' song. To the crown which the Roman Emperor of the German Nation bore upon his head there clung the romantic mark of its origin, which the most realistic among the Hohenstaufen strove in vain to strip from it. The crown of the Hohenzollern Emperor is not woven about with a grey twilight of romance; it was longed for and won in struggle by the people to whom the genii of history vouchsafed a glorious rebirth, and of all that lives in that people by way of a craving for welfare and for culture, of a sense of power and of self-consciousness, this imperial crown is at once the symbol and the shining instrument. It is a genuinely modern crown, and he who wears it is filled with the mighty tasks which it lays upon him.

Not as a crusader and not as a conqueror does Wilhelm II. undertake the journey to Jerusalem; to consecrate the first Protestant church in the city of Zion is his intention and his purpose. But as the arrival of the Sultan's friend Friedrich II. once called forth a joyful stir in the Saracen world, so now the Mohammedan world awaits with undisguised sympathy the arrival of Wilhelm II., the "Sultan Prussian," who therefore owes it to himself, to his crown and to his people to surround the event of his visit with that outward splendour which proceeds from the world-position and the power of the German Empire. Surrounded by the heads of the Protestant Church, escorted by two chosen gunboats of his navy, he crosses the sea with the Empress in his Hohenzollern yacht, greeted in the city of the Doges by the Italian King and Queen, and halting at an intermediate station upon the Golden Horn as the guest of the Sultan. Germany travels with the Emperor, and the Mohammedan world is to know that it is Germany which it greets in his imperial person.

If men scent far-reaching political plans and designs behind this journey of Wilhelm II. to the East, and if mistrustful glances are directed from every side upon the imperial pilgrim to Jerusalem, yet nothing of all that is surmised is farther-reaching than the fact itself, that the true conception of the power and greatness of Germany is being borne to the East by her imperial representative. All suppositions of a German craving for an Oriental protectorate, of a German interference in foreign spheres of influence, of tendencies of personal ambition and of national lust for expansion, are petty in comparison with the event itself, which works upon the imagination like a piece of renewed romance and yet stirs the most modern practical politician to a wealth of reflections. Let us say it straight out: the journey of Wilhelm II. to Jerusalem becomes a great international event through the personality of this Emperor. In the ten years since he has borne the crown he has proved himself a prince of peace, whom all the temptations of power, all the allurements of temperament and of delight in action have been unable to lead astray. But peace, as he understood it, was no indolent repose upon the pedestal which his grandfather and that grandfather's successful Chancellor had left him; his sovereign genius found — often enough to the astonishment of the world — the ways of filling peace also with a great content. This content is expressed in his words: "The end of our century stands under the sign of traffic," and "Our future lies upon the water." The hypertrophy of German national prosperity ab-