King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, who has been paying his first
visit to Berlin as an independent sovereign, has been welcomed with great cordiality by the German Emperor. Yesterday week, at a banquet held in his honour at Potsdam, the Emperor expressed the pleasure he had experienced ill appointing him Colonel-in-Chief of the 4th Thuringian Infantry Regiment and the sympathy with which the people of Germany followed his life-work in promoting the progress of Bulgaria, which had become an important factor for peace and the advance of civilization. In his reply King Ferdinand spoke of the " incom- parable army" of the Emperor, which had always served as an 950 example to the Bulgarians, and the debt which a great part of their youth owed to their German educators. In connexion with King Ferdinand's visit, which marks the close of a long period of detachment, to call it by no harsher name, on the part of Germany, the Times correspondent in Berlin notes that a sensational statement has appeared in the Temps to the effect that Bulgaria and Servia recently concluded a treaty of alliance for the partition of Macedonia, and that, having communicated the information to Greece and Rumania, and apparently secured the approval of Russia, King Ferdinand is now testing the opinion of Berlin and Vienna. The state- ment is discounted by a semi-official telegram in the Cologne Gazette as irreoonoilable with the political sagacity of King Ferdinand, and little stress is attached- to the political im- portance of the visit in the German Press.
