29 SEPTEMBER 1917, Page 2

We are prepared to recognize wit even in unexpected quarters,

and must credit the Kaiser with a neat saying about Heligoland. The late Sir H. IL Stanley compared Lord Salisbury's bartering of Heligoland for Zanzibar to the exchange of a trouser.button for a whole suit. The Kaiser, in recalling this comparison the other day, remarked, in vindication of what had thus been described as a bad bargain for Germany, that " thie trourer-button holds our wholesuit together." The epigranris telling, and, unfortunately, has profoundtruth in it. The Kaiser was lees fortunate in his assertion that "Marshal Hindenburg is the Wotan and General Ludendorff the Siegfried of our time," for if the old Field-Marshal whose images Germans worship is the Wotan, them seems to be no place for the Kaiser in the new Valhalla.