The article in question, clearly inspired, begins as the statement of German schemes usually begins, benignly enough, and dreamily proposes that the Dobrudscha might possibly be given to Bulgaria as a reward for her military exertions, and that Rumania might be compensated (_pace_ the Ukraine) with the south of Bessarabia. These two territories, of course, embrace the mouth of the Danube. Then, less dreamily, it awakes to the fact that German interests are owed a Germano-protected region at the mouth of the Danube, for the Danube rises in German soil, and Germany has a further claim on territory at its mouth, since the conquest of the Dobrudscha was largely due to German arms, and “in political life it is always a mistake to exercise liberality without seeing that you get something for it.” Germany must therefore reconsider her first plan of giving the Dobrudscha in its entirety to Bulgaria. The argument is now broad awake. It finds that on ethnological grounds Germany has a right to claim territory in the Dobrudscha, because among the 300,000 inhabitants of that district there are at least 10,000 German colonists. Germany therefore is entitled (on the principle she has always advocated of no annexation but the national right to national territory) to one-thirtieth of the acreage of the Dobrudscha. That will perfectly content her, and she claims a fraction of her one-thirtieth at the mouth of the Danube. On similar grounds she claims a similar footing in Bessarabia (otherwise Rumania) and takes her acres exactly opposite, on the other bank of the Danube. She is still below the estimate of her proper percentage of territory, and so our article alludes to a convenient island in the Black Sea called Schlangeisel, which is 50 kilometres from the mouth of the Danube, and that she likewise earmarks. There is a poetic suitableness in her getting this little island, for the article naively observes that Schlangeisel at the mouth of the Danube quaintly corresponds to Heligoland at the mouth of the Elbe.