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No. 42. | Vienna, 21 October 1898. | 2nd Year.

☞ As a considerable number of subscriptions expire at the end of this month, those concerned are reminded to effect their renewal in good time, so that no interruption may occur in the delivery of the paper.

The Administration.

The Emperor and the Sultan.

By O. Erter.

It is autumn-time, and the wind drives the withered leaves to the ground. Through the European forest of leaves made of paper and printer's ink the wind has passed as well, and rustling there whirl together the countless myths with which crafty folly sought to distort the German Emperor's journey to the Orient and to expose it to suspicious misinterpretations.

It has not succeeded; the autumn wind has done its duty. As the guest of Sultan Abdul Hamid, William II. is sojourning for the second time in Constantinople, and when the brilliant festivities which his host has prepared for him are at an end, he will set the course of his yacht south-eastward, towards the Holy Land, towards Jerusalem. It is a spectacle which, like a miracle, fills the imagination of contemporaries with pictures of splendid colour and enriches their circle of thought with new problems! There, where from the shore of the Bosphorus the eye embraces the boundaries of two quarters of the globe, the political friendship between the German and the Ottoman Empires, and the personal friendship between the Emperor and the Sultan, is once more sealed. It has proved itself ever since William II. first sojourned on the Golden Horn in the year 1889. German policy, whose peaceableness is subject to no doubt, came forward disinterestedly for the preservation of the Ottoman territorial possessions; the German army furnished the Turkish with the instructors to whom Abdul Hamid owed his victory over the Greeks. Now Germany reaps the fruit; the gratitude of the Sultan and of the whole Mohammedan world finds its expression in the loud sympathy which William II. meets with in Constantinople, and which is at the same time an act of homage to the German Empire.

In the narrowest and in the widest political sense, no other interpretation than this is needed to secure the right light for William II.'s journey to the land of the morning. The Emperor follows his desire to visit Jerusalem, and before he enters the city of Zion through the Jaffa Gate he spends some days with the sovereign of Palestine. This sovereign is the Sultan. But it is not shyly and mistrustfully that the Mussulman follows the great "Giaour" with his gaze; rather he greets him with sincere gladness and with cordial confidence. Over yonder in Kirit the renunciation of the last token of Ottoman sovereignty is being extorted from the Sultan by four European Great Powers at this very moment, while the Yildiskiosk harbours the imperial guest; yet this episode does no injury to the great fact that Germany's prestige in the Orient is in course of mighty increase. On the contrary, the imperial festivities in Constantinople offer, precisely by the contrast in which they stand to the temper of the Mohammedans towards the Cretan quartet of Powers, the most palpable measure of the peaceful successes of German policy in the Orient.

These successes are least mistaken where they are feared and envied; hence it is to be explained that the question of the protectorate, the Anatolian railway construction, and sundry other things — omnes et quaedam aliae — have been brought into connection with William II.'s journey to Jerusalem. It is not even impossible that the striking resolve of the four Powers to let their ultimatum go forth to the Porte at precisely this time was dictated by the intention of showing the Sultan that besides Germany there are yet other Great Powers in Europe. Cabinet diplomacy is now and then subject to such fits of contrariness. But it is one of those stereotyped errors which the diplomatic trade is wont to bring forth, to overlook the difference which exists between questions of power and influence and great civilising ideas, Germany assuredly does not wish to establish itself in the Orient as the territorial rival or the rival in power of Russia. It can, on the other hand, make its growing authority in the land of the morning serviceable to the spread of civilisation; and so far as the thoughts of William II. permit themselves to be surveyed and discerned in their inner connexion, this and nothing else is the substance of the political programme of his journey to Jerusalem. But nothing is more natural than that he should herein have in view above all the means at his own command, in order that the Mohamme