ROYAL PRIVILEGES

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXIX, Issue 7402, 4 February 1908, Page 1

ROYAL PRIVILEGES

From all accounts the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, is not popular with the people. This is easy to understand if an article in an English magazine on royal prerogative in Austria is correct. There must be nearly a hundred Hapsburgs, email and great, in existence, and their various privileges are calculated to foster Republicanism. A scion of the Hapsburg family not only shares in the entailed family estates, but has free use of the telegraph, telephone, and postal services, special railway favours, freedom from customs duties, entire immunity from taxation, and the right to command all sorts of service from conscripts. For instance, when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand goes to epend a few days at his Bohemian country seat at Kenopischt, the residents of the neighbourhood are put to considerable discomfort by the fact that the telegraph wires are monopolised by the Royal household. However urgent a private message may be it has to give way to the pile of telegrams from the castle. If these telegrams were on State business there would be an excuse for this delay of private messages, but they deal with the*most ordinary details of the life of the household such as the ordering of provisions from Vienna. They might just as well go by post, but the Royal servants find it more convenient to telegraph. The Archduchess Marie Valeric, when in residence in her Danube castle, monopolises telegranh and telephone wires. She has nine little Archdukes and Archduchesses —who, when they grow up, will presumably exercise similar privileges—and it is apparently unthinkable that their wants should be attended to by post. Francis Ferdinand is very particular about his mails; certain papers must follow him to certain places. The other day a paper went astra- and the Archduke demanded that the cuWi't bo disciplined. There were a hundred men employed in the office in which the paper was readdressed, so the whole hundred were instructed to write on slips of paper two addresses, that on the wrapper of the paper and that to which the paper should have been sent, The men, however, suspected the reason for this order, and none of the handwritings were found to correspond with the address on the paper. His chamberlain circularised picture post card dealers, offering to supply post cards of the Archduke and family at a very low rate, the prices to include free delivery by registered post. The post card manufacturers were naturally indignant. An express train is etc ed daily near the Hungarian frontier to pick up milk from the Archduke Frederick's dairy farm, and carry it quickly to Vienna, and farmers who have to send their milk by slow trains feel aggrieved.