the Caliphate_; =but if she wishes at all to grow into a constitutional state, she will have to make as little use of it as possible.... A strong Turkey, it goes without saying, will never claim political sovereignty over the Islamic subjects of other powers....=” In his latest pamphlet, _Deutschland und der Islam_, Becker confesses his recent conversion and argues that his long-cherished notions were wrong. He, as well as Grothe, dwells at length on the two visits paid by Emperor William to Sultan Abdulhamîd (1889 and 1898), the second one combined with what Grothe calls “_a political pilgrimage to the Holy Land_.” The world has considered these visits, the first of which took place one year after the concession of the Anatolian railway, that is to say in 1889, as overgorgeous demonstrations of Germany’s industrial and commercial interest in Turkey. The way it was done made many, even in Germany, shrug their shoulders. First of all Abdulhamîd, the “blood-drinking” tyrant, in whose crimes the great powers after all shared the guilt, on account of what Berard, and together with him Hartmann, called “_the conspiracy of silence_,” seemed a strange object for such a hearty expression of friendship, which left behind it in Constantinople a lumbering commemorative fountain, which according to experts is an insult to good taste. Furthermore, the impression produced on the Moslim world was not at all such as was intended. To be sure, it was thought remarkable that the monarch of a powerful European empire should go twice to pay homage to the Sultan, the more as it was known that no return-visits of the Sultan followed; _the caller_ therefore showed himself to the inhabitants as _the inferior_; and simple Mohammedan souls, who draw their knowledge of the world’s map and the world’s history more from legends than from reality, saw in this a confirmation of their belief that the whole earth is subjected to the mightiest Moslim sovereign, and that all princes are his vassals, even if they are in parts very unruly. Those homages in no way contributed to the glory of Germany in the East, whatever flatterers may palm off about it on German travellers. The strangest impression of all, however, was produced on all those who know Islâm by the Emperor’s speech on his second journey (1898), at Damascus, at the grave of Saladin, on which he also deposited a wreath.