The Royal Caste.

Evening Post, Volume LXIV, Issue 47, 23 August 1902, Page 3 (Supplement)

The Royal Caste.

There are points about the Kings and Crown Princes of Europe— tho "European family," as the Emperor Nicholas I. once described them— of whom we aro just .now hearing and seeing so much, that are not a little perplexing. They discredit the wisdom alike of tho, physicists and the philanthropists. 'The l'rinces ought, for oxample, to be rather a rotten race, and they are not. They most of them— indeed, all of them except tho Swede and the Servian— belong to families which have lived in great luxury for eight hundred years, which have in that period thrown up' from time to timo individuals of exceptional immorality, which have preferred intermarriage to any other method of seeking brides, and which ought therefore by this time to be thoroughly worn out. They are not worn out at all. They we rather good lives, as actuaries count lives, they would make a very fair troop of dragoons, and they are personally rather more energetic, not to say fussy, than other people. With the exception of the Spanish •branch of the Bourbons, they have shown, and are still showing, little sign of .feebleness ; and even in that house the unexplained taint in the blood, which did not produce insanity but a m«utal and bodily incompetence, seems to be working itself out. We suppose their incessant cares, and jthe work which those cares compel them to do, havo preserved the strength of the race, as they preserved that of the patrician families of Rome, who did not disappear, as people fancy, under the Empire ; but the fact is a little at variance with the current theories of heredity. So, also, is the other fact that tho different lines, .though none of them have beeu made competent eitlwr "by adversity or asceticism, have produced rather more thon their shore of exceptional ability. No line of nobles hns thrown up more competent men than the- Hohenzollerns ; the Bourbons have produced at" least three first-class soldiers ; the houye of Hapsburg shows us Maria Theresa, her son Joseph, the Archduke Charles, the Archduke Albrecht, and many another 1 whose place in hisory is not due to flattery ; while the Hohenzollerns have made Germany, and the Romanoffs have built and preserved the autocracy which still affronts all political philosophy. Even Napoleon was foiled iv the contest of guile by Alexander 1., "thnt Greek of the Lower Empire " ; and though Nicholas I. failed, and probably committod suicide, he was a terrible person with large ideas. They nil, too, nave mnriifested one singular power, which surely is equivalent, as power, to genius for command or administrative ability. They havo all, oven the comparatively undistinguished Guelphs, contrived through ages of storm and stress to keep themselves at the top of tho world, and preserve a sort of monopoly of initiative. They have been helped, no doubt, 'by advisers greater than themselves ; but still, the capacity to profit by advice is not tho mark of r decaying race. On the oilier baud, the reigning "family" of Euiope does not encourage the dreams of those who fnncy that boeauso animals can be bred to a certain point of perfection, so a race of men, if well fed, fairly (wight, well exercised, and employed in noble work, could be developed to a point which no section of mankind has yet reached, The conditions which should make Mich a race afc the conditions undor which the princely houses havo been reared. They have air had the beat lodging md the' best food pt ocurable at tho time, they have all been trained either as soldiers or sportsmen^ they have all had the means of acquit ing knowledge, and they have all bad inspiriting work to do. Yet they remain very like other people. Hie notion that they are when seen clo-e inferior persons, whose repute has been produced solely by flattery, is a fiction invented by Republicans of the closet ; but they certainly have never reached any high and lasting level of ability suoh ns must have distinguished tho limited number of slavaholding families in Greece who gave to

mankind Greek art, Greek literature, and Greek political thought. They are on tile level for the most part of competent English squires, but not higher than that, though the importance of the questions with which they have hud to dual has made them seem higher. Very few Princes have been originnl men, nud the descendants of these few have, we think, without an exception slipped back to the ordinary level. It would bo easy to draw up a list of greater personages who have been bred up in poverty or amid rather squalid suirouudings. That does not prove that poverty nnd squnlor are good conditions to breed • great men among, but it does prove thnt what are considered good conditions will not of themselves produce them. You cannot, thnt is, breed a truly Royal caste. Wo have used the word " caste," and no doubt in one way the Princes a truo caste ; that is, they have been intormarried for hundreds of years, and have manifested a strong desire to protect their own superior claims of birth. But in another respect they are not a caste, and it is rather a puzzle to explain why they have not become one. They ought, properly speaking, that is, if science reveals anything about heredity, to have a definite stamp on them, to belong to an easily recognisable type of mankind ; and they do not. Though each house is supposed to have a separate face — the sameness is chiefly imaginary — the members of the caste have no special likeness to one another even of a shadowy kind. There may l>e a porsonal likeness oCfcasionnlly, indeed there is one — viz., that between the present Tsar and the present Prince of Wales — but there is no more general similarity of type than there is in the, House of Commons, where also accidental likenesses aro very close. Look at the range- of princely photographs which have recently appeared in the illustrated papers,' and compare, say, the Crown Prince of Roumanin, who is Hohenzollern, and the- late- King of Saxony. The latter suggests Tennyson's ideal squire, the former the typical thinking man. Nor is there, s6 far as we can read history, any mental identity among them. All, no doubt, show the' sense of superiority bred in them by their training, all — which is very curious — are nervously sensitive about their dignity, and all think a little more of the future than ordinary citizens do ; but there the similnrity ends. Though they have all the sa¥n6i<ind"6f business, 'the 'same kind of claims to reverence, and the same dangers to face, there is no professional cachet on them, such, for, example, as comes upon soldiers nnd sailors, and, in a less degree, physicians. Difference of residence is no sufficient explanation of this, for the Jews are still more widely scattered nhd keep their type ; and we can only suppose that the position of a King so promotes individuality that no type, either physical or mental, has any fair chance of dominance. There are distinctions in the kind and the range of their authority, in the sort of work they have to } do — the Emperor, of Austria is neceyanly a diplomatist, tho Emperor of Germany a Commnnder-in-Chief, the Emperor of Russia a Judge — which tend to keep them Bopnrnte from oach other We doubt if even tho selfishness which Mr. Langton Sanford wrote an essay to provo inherent nnd inevitnblo in nil Kings is by any means universal. As against any individual's claims it mny be true, for a King is a corporation, but as agninst the people it has often been proved by irresistible evidence to be false. Selfishness, indeed, and patriotism are inextricably mingled in their minds, for that whierl injures the country necessarily injures thorn, and that which injures thorn almost as frequently luirls the country. But taking tho whole rangu of character into consideration, tho rungs aro quite ns unlike each other as iwiy similar number of persons selected out of the crowd would be.- The one thing they arc- alike in is their failure to exhibit genius in any of its more ordinary manifestations. One sees reasons why, looking down, as they must look down, upon mundane affairs from a kind of height, they should be pltilonophers j but no Royal pen has nddeel anything to the philosophies which have remoulded tho minds of men. Gautama, indeed, wns probably born in a ruling house, and Marcus Aurelius held the position of a Monarch ; but neither tho Buddhist nor the Stoic was "exactly a ' King in the modern acceptation of tho word. Ono would think that a' King might be a poet, and a greafc one ; but there is no poem by a Royal author which is above fifth rank or which really Kves in the memories of men. King David, whether he 'ever wrote any of the Psalms, or not, wan probably a considernble poet, else why should age long tradition have affixed to him so improbable a character? but David, though he became a Sheikh, began life ns a little yeoman. No King has ever been a great author, or a brilliant orator, or an architect, or a' painter, or even a musician. It i£ with a sense of keen surprise, ns of something altogether outside precedent, thnt men note in William TI. of Germany the capacity, to be all these things ; but even lie has never so used his powers ns to establish in any of these departments a claim to be what Julius Caesar was in military history, a writer of the first rank. Shyness may have something to do with it, for all Kings, Ambassadors tell us, are more or less shy ; but we fancy the true reason is .that they have not cared for the effort, kingship making nil other kinds of work seem small and uninrportant. Still, in spite of an occasional phenomenon like AVilliain 11., we cannot but think that one o-f the ntlributes of the kingly cascc which lias peftnvps contributed to their safety and to the loyalty of their peoples has been want of originality. The peoples nre very ordinary, nnd the Kings they like are men whom they are nble to understand. Ono Great Mogul wns a mnn of genius, as genius is commonly understood, "and he was the only one who failed to keep his throne. — Spectator.