Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/156

 means of strengthening the bonds between Germany and the Ottoman Empire.

An excellent illustration of the inter-relation among economic, political, and religious aspects of modern imperialism is to be found in the visit of William II to Turkey in 1898. On the morning of October 31—the anniversary of the posting of Luther's ninety-five theses at Wittenberg—the Emperor participated in the dedication of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem. During the afternoon of the same day he presented the supposed site of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary to the German Catholics of the Holy City, for the construction thereon of a Catholic memorial church, and he telegraphed the Pope expressing his hope that this might be but one step in a steady progress of Catholic Christianity in the Near East. The Kaiser likewise might have visited the German Jewish communities in the vicinity of Jerusalem, but perhaps he felt, as a French writer put it, that such a visit "between his devotions at Gethsemane and at Calvary would have created a public scandal."[27] Nevertheless he did not hesitate, a week later, at Damascus, to assure "three hundred million Mohammedans" that the German Emperor was their friend. Yet with all this pandering to religious interests—to the Protestants of Prussia, to the Catholics of South Germany, to his Moslem hosts—the Kaiser found time ostentatiously to promote the German Consul at Constantinople to the rank of Consul General. And upon his return home he justified all of these activities on the ground that his visit "would prove to be a lasting source of advantage to the German name and German national interests."[28]

This curious admixture of religion and diplomacy was made the more complicated when the Imperial Chancellor informed the Reichstag, on December 7, 1898, that one of the purposes of the Emperor's visit to His Ottoman