Tue German Emperor has been on his igrimage.- With one eye on the atherland, and the -other on its future, he is. one- of the few great theatrical' figures on the world's stage, and if there were no dramas of real earnest in progress; his travels, even as a Cook's tourist, would doubtlessly-absorb a very large portion of the world's-attention. For to the mass of un travelled men and women the glamour of the East is still strong... Not so strong as it was-in the earlier-half of the century when Kinglake wrote Hothen, photography having: done' its utmost "to: show things..ns they: really are, but still powerful. from the effects: of early training and the doubtful efforts of religious imagination, The traveller of to-day starts forth with a vastly different mental equipment from tat which filled the brains of the palmer of the "middle ages, or even the pilgrim of the past-century. His' training. has been on different lines; he has been taught to examine, to weigh, to question, even to doubt. His mind is an interrogation. mark, not a_ parenthesis to be filled by somebody outside his own identity. It is not to be wondered.at therefore that his conclusions are not conclusions of the enthusiast. for whose credulity no strain was too strong, bub rather, are the cold, hard, dry verdict of the physical scientist. The modern re- e presentative of: the medieval pilgrim is still.in evidence—witness the crowded streets of Lourdes. But by his side: is the matter-of-fact: man who discovers (vide the: Saturday Review, correspondence) that one of the officiating priests'there is in the habit of.taking his annual "cure" at a German: bad! So. it is everywhere. "The reading public is becoming more and more a sceptical public, and travel does but confirm its want of faith, -People are. sceptical - simply because-they have been asked to Delieve itea much. A man may be "brought to acknowledge that the Old Testament story of the passage of the Red Sea-may have an actual basis of fact. He may: possibly find that even to-day a-wind blowing: persistently for some time in a given direction may uncover certain stretches of sand, and so. enable man to " walk over dryshod,"" but the "wall of water onthe right hand and on "the left." he re; erty. He stands by the shore Dead: Sea. All is solitude. The story -in Genesis comes into his mind. He recalls the valley of Sodom and the awful destruction that betel it, Historical: instances~"crowd: his thoughts, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Lisbon; and the more recent cataclysm of Krakatoa, and he accepts at once. the possibility of the old' Biblical story. What he eliminates from it is its supernatural admixture. He may be filled, and often is, with what Matthew Arnold calls an "infinite tenderness for the popular science of religion." But this only renders his attitude to others' belief somewhat more yielding than it might otherwise be: it does not modify the firmness of his own unbelief. He willingly acknowledges the value of many an old-world tale; he finds a place for it in the sphere of poetry; it provides him with symbols for the emotions, but not with truths for the understanding. Arnold's position in his day was what is somewhat vulgarly known as "being on the fence." The sceptic'was right, but the believer was justified.
Modern travel is doing' much to disentangle the difficulty of this position. The scream of the locomotive, and the rattle of the railway train are fast turning the "sacred soil" of the East into a haunt of the globe-trotter. Mysticism vanishes before such an invasion. It can exist only amongst those who, like the pilgrims of old, were prepared to accept without [question whatever might be told them. Superstition thrives in such case. Its most favourable soil is religious' credulity; before independent research it wilts and dies. Up to the time of Kinglake, the old-world glamour of the mystic East, the land of marvel and miracle, the land which no one had thoroughly lored except in the pages of the Bible at his mother's knee, still held full sway. It had scarcely been sullied by the breath of the Western sceptic.° But the author of Hothen shows signs that the modern spirit had begun to claim its own. He tells us in his preface how he was moved to write of things as they were, and not as preconceived notions would have had them "My excuse for the book is its truth," he says. " My narrative is not merely righteous in matters of fact (where fact is in question), but it is true in this larger sense,—it conve not' those impressions which ought to have been produced upon any well-constituted mind but those which were really and truly received at the time of his rambles by a headstrong and not very amiable traveller, whose prejudices in favour exceedingly Tight. Ss Thave felt so of other lo's notions were then
Ivhave written; and the result is, that there will often be found in my narrative a jarring discord between the associations properly belonging to interesting sites, and the tone in which I~speak of them." 'Thus in few words does the famous historian, foreshadow the intense' individualism of these modern days, an individualism compared with which his "exceedingly slight" prejudices. in "favour of other people's notions" would be rank bigamy.
But, to bring our illustrations up. to date, and to transfer our attention from the world of faith to that of fact, we may notice how patent a factor travel may become in the correction of preconceived ideas if we consider one of the main results of the Spanish-American war. We may, in all honesty, credit the American. nation with humanitarian objects. the declaration and prosecution of the late war.. Four months ago probably ninety-nine per cent of. the English-speaking world were fall convinced of the iniquity of Spanis rule. They have had this belief fully borne out. But the tours of the armies and navies of the States have as clearly disproved another assumption with which they started out, viz., that the Cubans and Filipinos were ripe for self-government. This is a modern instance on a colossal scale of the way in which travel overturns misconceptions.
So, too, there is a political side, to the pilgrimage of the German Emperor, and as. there are ancient religious faiths, so there are ancient political faiths. Amongst these are those which, in the not distant future, allot Asia Minor to Russia, and Syria to France. But in not a few minds there is a feeling that the visit of the German Emperor to Palestine foreshadows an attempt to prevent the realisation of these dreams of expansion. We may, or we may not believe that Russian growth' has practically reached its territorial limit. Certain it is that unmistakable signs of the. times point to the fact that any further, widening will have to overcome a resistance to which, except on one occasion, the Colossus of the North has been a stranger. For alike on the European, Asiatic, and American sides the movements of the Czar are being. closely watched. His frontiers are thousands of miles length, but there is scarcely a league of the whole distance which is unmarked by a notice board in English, German, or Japanese—*Trespassers. will be prosecute ed." Travel and commerce combined have taught these nations that it is high time the selfish system of Russian expansion should be checked.
To many people these results of modern wanderings are not altogether agreeable. Particularly deplored are those sceptical tendencies to which we have referred. And yet it is difficult to see any sufficient. ground for regret. What matters how many of the rags of superstition we maj lose if the beauty of trath stands more clearly revealed? No true metal will be lost in the testing... Rather will it emerge from the fire purged of all dross.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.