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 minds which were very unlikely to be realized.

The Emperor’s allusion to Saladin as the most knightly sovereign of all times was a bad blunder.  He was doubtless carried away by a combination, in his probably at this time somewhat excited imagination, of the chivalrous figures of the crusading times with thoughts of the German Knight Templars and other soldierly characters.  Saladin was a brave man physically, and fond of imperial magnificence, as is only natural and necessary for an Oriental potentate to be; and a good deal of Eastern legend grew up about him on that account.  Legend was enough for the Emperor in his then romantic mood.  He forgot, or did not know, that Saladin, from the point of view of a modern and in reality far more knightly age, was a sanguinary and fanatic ruffian, who showed no mercy to his Christian prisoners—­killed, in fact, one of them, Rainald de Chatillon, with his own hand, sacked Jerusalem, turned the Temple of Solomon into a mosque, after having it “disinfected” with rose-water, and killed Pope Urban III, who died, the chronicles tell, of sorrow at the news.