Saladin (Salâh-ad-din) has become popular in Europe through the history of the Crusades and especially through Lessing; in the Mohammedan East his name has been long forgotten, except by the few students of history and literature. These know him as an unscrupulous politician, who by faithlessness and treason had risen to great power, and who is forgiven much because he was a strictly orthodox _kâfir_-hater; and not as the example of eighteenth-century tolerance which Lessing in his _Nathan der Weise_ has made of him. On the grave of this hater of Christianity, the Emperor of a world-empire, which, as Becker reminds us, has Christianity as its state-religion, spoke these words: “_The three hundred million Mohammedans that are scattered through the world may rest assured that the German Emperor will eternally[10] be their friend._” This part of the display has made as little permanent impression in the Moslim world as Saladin himself; and German scientists at that time shook their heads when they heard of it. But now these words suddenly are at a premium: Grothe and Becker give their interpretations of them, and the Turks have been so energetically reminded of them that Nazim-bey quoted them in his address to the German ambassador and that the Sultan by mistake borrowed from them the oftentimes corrected, at any rate very antiquated, census-figures of his manifesto. Till recently Becker, “through ignorance,” as he now avers, has “_considered this emphasizing of the Caliph-title by Germany as a mistake_”; but now, after Prince von Bülow’s explanations in _Deutschland unter Kaiser Wilhelm II._, he joyfully discovers in it the first powerful expression of “_a conscious German Islâm-policy_” and the proof “_that German policy has from the first taken Islâm into account as an international factor_.” Becker’s scientific conscience, in this conversion and in his defence of the adoption of the Caliphate among the factors of international politics, is not so untroubled as that of Grothe, who does not seem to feel at all the grotesqueness of this Islâm-policy. At any rate, Becker says that he does not wish to be considered as having expressed an opinion on the relation between Turkey and Germany; that he restricts himself to stating the fact that such a relation exists; that, as a matter of fact, millions of dissatisfied Mohammedan subjects of European nations expect their salvation from Turkey, and that the hour has struck for Germany to make use of this mood. * * * * *