MAD CZARS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1866, 26 August 1887, Page 31

MAD CZARS.

In the recently-published memoirs of Count Vitzthun, of Eckstadt, proofs are given of the hereditary character of the mental disease which has afflicted the Imperial family of Russia. All the sons of the Czar Paul I, like that unhappy monarch himself, who was murdered in 1801, became subject to 'fits of insanity. , Paul I had four sonsCzar Alexander I, the^Grand Duke Constantine, Czar Nicholas I, and the Grand Duke Michael. Every one of them, after his forty-fifth year, exhibited undoubted signs of mental derangement. This was not fully discovered, in the case of Nicholas I, until after the Czar's death. An English physician, however, as Count Vitzthun says, had occasion to notice the appearance of the hereditary disease in the Czar as early as July 1853, and he then predicted that the monarch had not more than two years of life in front of him. He made the prediction in a letter to Lord Palmerston, in the hope that it might hinder the warlike complications which were threatening to disturb the peace of Europe. The Count had no doubt that if the war fever could have been allayed for the space of two years, until the half-mad Czar was dead, thousands and thousands of human lives would have been .saved.

The Emperor Nicholas died in March 1855, about four months earlier than the date predicted by the English physician. The Count appears to have no doubt that the Crimean War, so far as it depended upon Nicholas, was the rash act of a ruler " whose mental equipoise was disturbed "—that is to say, in plain English, who was actually mad. None of the four sons of Paul I lived to be 60 years of age, and every oneof them suffered from congestion of the brain after reaching hi 3 forty-fifth year.

Alexander I died when he was 84 years old — a miserable man, moody and dispondent, as Prince Metternich has painted him in his well-known portrait of that sovereign, " tired of existence."

His brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, though not manifestly insane, gave frequent signs of mental disturbance, of which he was himself so painfully conscious as to declare that he did not think himself a fit person to be' entrusted with the reigns of Government. His: conduct an the /year 1830, at the outbreak of the revolution in Warsaw, will re-

main as the historical justification of his intellectual unsoundness; - If hehad become Czar, he would probably, .not have escaped the fate of his brother ; and, as it was, he he had to be entrusted to, the care of his wife, the Princess Lowicz, who was cautioned, in the same way as is a physician in charge of a patient- who has intermittent fits of insanity. He died in his fifty-second year from -congestion^ of th 6 brain. J The Grand Duke Michael was killed by a' fall from his horse at the age of 48. Some years before his death he had exhibited signs of undoubted mental disease, so that one of his physicians did not hesitate to declare that' he was on the road to certain insanity.

The events of the years 1848-52 were not calculated to allay the hereditary disposition of the Imperial family of Russia, but to excite and intensify them. There is something terrible in the contrast between the outward position of the Czar Nicholas, upon the bent of whose will the late of so many millions in Europe was {depending, and the diseased inward condition of his mind.