The Auckland Star. WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 1931. THE LAST OF THE DESPOTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 138, 13 June 1931, Page 8

The Auckland Star. WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 1931. THE LAST OF THE DESPOTS.

For #/te cause that fades assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance. For the future in the distance', And the good that we can do.

The expulsion of King Alfonso from Spain is not likely to produce any serious disturbance in the political equilibrium of Europe, but it is, in one sense at least, an epoch-marking event. For Alfonso was the last of the absolute monarchs, the sole survivor of those representatives of dynastic royalty who for so many centuries controlled the destinies of the civilised world. "To-day," as a distinguished British journalist has said, "the whole of Europe and Asia from the Straits of Dover to the Sea of Japan may be traversed without once touching the territories of an hereditary monarch." It was natural that Spain, so Jong habituated to the absolutist traditions of the Habsburgs 'and' the Bourbons, should lag behind the other European States in their slow but persistent advance toward political freedom. But now Alfonso has followed where Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs led the way, and Europe has detached itself, and no doubt permanently, from the old conceptions of kingship which for ages dominated the life and the spirit of all mankind.

It is difficult for the average man, reared under democratic influences in the modern world, to realise the true character of monarchy under the.dynastic system which prevailed for ages in Europe, and even in a more extreme form in Asia. The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings Avas part and parcel of the monarchist creed everywhere, and with this conception of royalty went the natural assumption that those fortunate enough to be "born in the purple" Avere invested with authority to treat the lands subject to them, and the inhabitants of those territories, as their own personal possessions. To the dynastic monarchs of the Middle Ages the people were for the most part merely goods and chattels, to be exploited or enslaved or bartered away, in any fashion that might promote the interests or enlarge the prerogatives or stabilise the authority of the king. It is only when we understand these things that we can appreciate the position in which the Emperor Francis Joseph or Kaiser Wilhelm or the Czar Nicholas 11. stood toward his subjects; and little as we may sympathise with their policy and their character, we must own that, from men weighed down by the burden of such Imperial traditions, it was hopeless to expect sympathy for any form of constitutionalism or Liberalism or Democracy.

The revolt against Absolutism has been a prolonged struggle extending over many centuries, and it seemed to culminate in the great revolutionary upheavals of the nineteenth century and the establishment of either constitutional or republican government throughout a large portion of Europe. But the process of emancipation had not gone far enough to satisfy the needs and aspirations of the people, and when the Great War came it wrought havoc with Kingship in almost every monarchical State. The rulers of Russia and Austria-Hungary and Germany were not the only royalties to succumb; for "the Continent was littered with fallen crowns from the Rhine to the Bosphorus." Where Monarchy still survives in Europe it is no longer absolute, but constitutional. In Spain, whose people were so long indoctrinated with the absolutist tradition, the revulsion has naturally been violent and destructive, and the Throne has been swept aAvay. Alfonso Avas not Avithout personal or official merits, but he represented a principle now discredited and obsolete, and he has fallen not because he Avas conspicuous or notorious for .vices or crimes, but because, in the Avords of Mr. A. G. Gardiner, "he sought to exercise a despotic personal poAver Avhich the modern world will not concede to an hereditary ruler, even though he has the virtues of an archangel."