DEATH LIES IN WAIT

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 35, 9 August 1930, Page 25

DEATH LIES IN WAIT

Many attempts have been, made to assassinate- Royal persons in recent years. Some of them havo been tho work of professed anarchists, of whom a large proportion were victims of tho insanity that so often afflicts the followers of this political creed.

All three successive assailants of Prince . Humbert's grandfather and namesake, the King of Italy, were anarchists; and the last of them succeeded in killing him in the streets of Monza in 1900.

Brussels was tho scene of the attempt made by the young anarchist Sipido to shoot King Edward VII. when he ; passed through tho city in The Prince Regent waa shot at in 1817, and Queen Victoria aho was attacked by an insane boy.

Another crimo occurred in Madrid in 1900, when an anarchist threw a bomb at tho present King Alfonso XIII. as he drove with his bride "on his wedding day.

Very - few countries have escaped these outrages (writes Dermot Morrah' in the London "Daily Mail"). It might perhaps be expected that the new world would be less liable to them than tho old; but three Presidents of tho United States have been assassinated. The great President Lincoln, reelected after the Civil War, was shot in his box at the theatre in 1865 by a partisan of the defeated South: while Garfield in 1881 and M'Kinley in 1901 also fell victims to the bullets of assassins who wero in the one case a dis-'

ROYALTY IS ALWAYS MENACED

appointed aspirant to. office, and. in the other a professed anarchist.

, Perhaps the two: most terriblo; of these, murders were attempts to avert threatened coups , d'etat by' reigning Kings. In 1903 King' Alexander of Servia, who had already;'given offence by marrying a-lady whose social antecedents, were considered unsuitable, tried to got rid of Ministers ho disliked by suspending the .Constitution for half an hour. He and his wife Draga were thereupon murdered 'With frightful sav-i agery by a conspiracy,of.military offi-i eers. ,' . I

In 1908' King Carlos "of Portugal was murdered, with his son Louis Duke of Br&ganza,' while- driving in Lisbon, apparently in consequence of his' attempt to restore order by investing Stenhor Franco with dictatorial powers.

Spaco will not allowomore than a bare. mention .of the Killing of Alexander 11.- of Eussia by Nihilists with bombs in 1881, and of President CarVot of ;Fraiico with a-kniio by an anarchist "irt "1894.'. '. ■ ... -:' '

..' But pei^hapa,,'tho mosti momentous assassination since that of. Caesar took place at .Serajevo, in Bosnia, on 28th June, 1914. On that dayvthe .Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian Throne, was shot with'his wife as they drove through'the streets. Though th« murderer was, in'fact, a Bosnian, the Australian Government' suspected that the' crime' was the result' of,» Serbian plot, and the attempt to exac-f;, humiliatIng conditions from Serbia precipitated the European war. '' , ( .',