massacre, listened to a naval captain’s lecture on Port Arthur, opened the new Lutheran Cathedral (the “Dom”) in Berlin, telegraphed thanks to the University of Pennsylvania for its doctor’s degree which the Emperor said he was proud to know George Washington once held, attended a lecture by Professor Delitzsch on “Assyria,” and was present at a memorial service for the painter Adolf von Menzel, who died this month.  In March he visited Heligoland, inspected the progress of some alterations at the Royal Opera in Berlin, and sent the Gold Medal for Science to Manuel Garcia, on the occasion of the latter’s hundredth birthday, as recognition of his invention of the laryngoscope, or mirror for examining the throat.

Just before starting for Morocco the Emperor made the speech in which he claimed that Germans are the “salt of the earth.”  In the same speech he had previously declared that as the result of his reading of history he meant never to strive after world-conquest.  “For what,” he asked,

“has become of the so-called world-empires?  Alexander the Great, Napoleon the First, all the great warrior heroes swam in blood and left behind them subjugated peoples, who at the first opportunity rose and brought their empires to ruin.  The world-empire which I dream of will be, above all, the newly established German Empire, enjoying on every side the most absolute confidence as a peaceable, honest, and quiet neighbour, not founded on conquest by the sword, but on the mutual confidence of nations, striving for the same objects.”

While on the way to Morocco the Emperor put in at Lisbon to pay a visit to the King of Portugal, and with the latter attended a meeting of the Geographical Society.  From Lisbon he went to Gibraltar, and from thence, after a few hours’ stay, he started for Tangier.

The Morocco incident, as it is often too lightly called, should rather be regarded as a phase in the world’s economic history and an occurrence of moment for the future peace of all nations than the mere game on the diplomatic chess-board many writers appear to consider it.  According to French critics, and they may be taken as representative of the feeling everywhere prevalent during the seven years the incident lasted, its origin was a matter of alliances and the balance of power.  Germany, according to these writers, wanted to preserve the position of hegemony in Europe she had obtained under Bismarck, and consequently felt annoyed by the Triple Entente, which robbed her of her traditional friend Russia and set up an effective counterpoise to the Triple Alliance of which Germany was the leading Power, and on which she could, or believed she could, rely for support in case of war with France.  In going, therefore, to Tangier, at the moment when her defeat by Japan rendered Russia for the time being of little or no account in the considerations of diplomacy, the Emperor, according to these writers, in reality was making a determined attempt to break the Entente combination and protect his Empire from political isolation or inferiority.