SUDDEN DEATH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8375, 22 July 1905, Page 1

SUDDEN DEATH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

Grave Crises which -would Result from the Leatfc of Monarcts.

(By "EX-ATTACHE," in the New Orleans " Times-Democrat.")

Although people in America hare been brought to believe that monarchs nowadays are mere puppets, the passive instruments of the will of their people, and ornamental figureheads which are entirely superfluous and in no sense indispensable to the welfare of the Commonwealth, yet the fact remains that in a number of oountries of the old world the sovereign constitutes to such an extent the king-pin of the situation as regard domestic policy and foreign relations that his or her sudden death at the present juncture would give rise to an important and possibly grave crisis at home as well as abroad, a crisis to which the United States cannot afford to remain indifferent. It is only by the exercise of • the most careful and skilful diplomacy that the war in Manchuria has been confined to Japan and Russia. Time and again during the last fourteen months have' there been, moments when it seemed impossible to prevent other Powers from being drawn into the conflict. Hostilities between European nations may be said to have trembled in the balance, and the situation lias been, and still remains, so thorny that there is no knowing -the extent of the trouble to which the demise of one or another of the rulers of Europe would give rise.