THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 1900. A ROYAL ASSASSINATION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 31, 2 August 1900, Page 17

THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 1900. A ROYAL ASSASSINATION.

+ HE phrase, ' As happy as a king,' finds little to support it in the hard world of facts of our day. For the regal diadem is too often a crown of thorns, and the mantles of Kings Priam and IjLAU seem to have fallen in shreds on most of k the royal houses of Europe in our day. Domestic bickerings form the canker-worm of the royalties of Russia, lWurtemburg, and Prussia. Scrofula has set its mark deep n the royal family of Madrid ; lung troubles in that of Savoy. Insanity of a hopeless type is the woful appanage of the royal stock of Bavaria, and, to some extent, of that of Denmark. The Emperor of Germany is the victim of hereditary disease. The late King of Holland died by inches of an inherited scourge. The domestic trials of the roya 1 families of England and Austria are well known. And if the King and Qnecn of Sweden have also their private skeleton in the closet, the door is double-locked and the key-hole plugged against the gimlet eye of public inquisition. The domestic blisters of European royalty are aggravated by the perennial and growing fear of the anarchist, lunatic, or fanatic, whose dagger, revolver, rifle, and bomb have made the lives of crowned rulers worth shorter purchase than those of plain Whanu the miller or the ploughman Hodge.

Within the past two years two crowned heads have fallen at the hand of the anarchist assassin. The later of these was Kinjj Huaiukut of Italy, who was shot through the heart near the royal residence at Monza on Monday last hy an anarchist named Ax(;ei,o Brkssi. Two previous attempts had hecn made — the one in 1878, the other in ISO7 — to take his life with da^ers. They happily failed, and the unfortunate monarch — who for 22 years possessed the frightened look, the quick and suspicious movement, and the nervous sense of a hunted animal — escaped death by treacherous steel only to meet it from the assassin's lead in the fifty-sixth year of his age. He had taken part in the spoliation of the States of the Church and in the treacherous occupation of Rome in I^7o, which was effected

by the Piedmontese Government in direct defiance of the L September Convention,' by which it had guaranteed the inviolability of the Papal frontier. The long revolutionary movement for the ruinous and so-called ' unification of Italy ' had throughout the active aid and sympathy of the House of Savoy, from the days of the luckless Charles Albert down till the hour in which a breach was buttered in the walls of Rome on September 20, 1870. Among its leading instruments were ' anarchy, red and black * ; the murderers of Pope Pius IX 's chief minister, Count Prllkgrino Rossi ; the would-be regicide, Felice Orsini ; and the apostle of political assassination, Giuseppe Mazzini. The 'gilded misery of ambition' has ever followed the House of Savoy. In its early days — as in the time of ' Amadeus with the Tail ' — it sought to rise to power by studiously marrying into the great houses of Europe. In the later and more degenerate days of Victor Emmanuel it strove for a higher throne and a wider rule through infringements of internationl law and usage, violations of treaty-rights, and the secret machinations of dark-lantern associations, which it fomented, subsidised, armed, and led within the boundaries of every free State in Italy. It petted anarchy. It courted the political assassin. And today King Humbert is himself the victim of the evil spirits that his father and his father's conscienceless counsellor, Count Cavour, evoked but could not lay. The saddest feature in this melancholy affair — and one that will probably add the sharpest pang to the grief of Humbert's estimable and pious Queen — is this : that this latest royal victim of the anarchist assassin died under the ban of the Church. But brief as was the time given to the murdered monarch by Bressi's deadly ball, we, however, venture the heartfelt hope that an all-merciful Providence may have extended a crowning grace and pardon to the hapless king in the moments of final consciousness that followed the impact of the leaden messenger of death, and that it may have been with him in the precious parting seconds of life as it is said to have been with the reckless old fox-hunting squire of whom it is written :—: — Between the stirrup and the ground He mercy sought and mercy found. In the depths of her great sorrow it will be a comfort to the devout Queen Margaret to remember that the first message of condolence came from the aged and venerable Pontiff, Leo XIII., and that he offered up the Holy Sacrifice for the repose of the soul of the departed King.

The late King Hu.mmkkt makes at least the sixth European crowned victim whose murdered bloud has 1 mounted upward ' in the course of the present century. Czar Paul was foully slain by his nobles in 1801 ; the Prince of Montenegro was assassinated in 1800 : Michael, Prince of Servia, in 1868; Czar Alexander 11. in I*Bl ; and and the Empress Elizabeth^ Austria in I*9B. To this list we might, perhaps, add the name of a scion of the imperial House of Hapsburg, Archduke Ferdinand, the ill-starred Emperor of Mexico, who was executed in 1867. Among the uncrowned heads of States that fell victims to private hate or political passion during the century were Presidents Lincoln (1865) and Gariield (1881), of the United States, and M. Carnot, President of the French Republic (1894). It is difficult to keep count of the numerous efforts made to ' remove ' European crowned heads. The first Napoleon hud a narrow escape from an infernal machine in 1800. In ]898 seven shots were fired — happily by \ery nervous hands — at the King of Greece. As already stated, two fruitless attempts were made on the life of King Humbert. His brother Amadeo was attacked, when King of Spain, in 1872. Two attempts were made on the life of Czar Alexander 111. ; two on that of Napoleon lit. ; two on that of Alfonso XII., King of Spain ; three on the lives of the Emperor of Austria and of Queen Isabella of Spain ; aa many as six efforts were made to ' take off ' Louis Philippe ; Czar Alexander 11. was attacked six times before he was finally killed in 1881 by a bomb thrown by an assassin who was also himself slain by its explosion ; and no fewer than seven attempts were made to assassinate, or do bodily injury to, her Majesty Qneen Victoria. And so recently as April 4 an abortive attempt was made at Brussels by a youth named Sipido to take tne life of the Prince of AVales.

The later attempts to murder the heads of States have been almost exclusively the work of anarchists, and chiefly of Italian anarchists, to whom a long succession of Piedmontese kings and statesmen have taught the dread power of uncompromising destruction that lies in underground plotting and the bomb and dagger and ball of the political assassin. But if Piedmont had hired the services of the anarchist, England, France, and Swilzeilund have given them asylum, and, on occasion, aid and counsel. Many of our readers will recall the enthusiasm with which those countries welcomed Mazzini, even after he had openly and notoriously belauded Hartmann, and declared that ' political assassination is the secret of successful revolutionary action.' Even Orsini found many sympathisers in London after his escape from Hungary, where sentence of death had been lecorded against him. London was long the headquarters of the International — a chiefly foreign anarchist association which ranked among its affiliated societies the Communards, who made Paris a city of blood-stained and smoking ruins in 1871. But Switzerland has long been, and ttill is, the chief hatching-ground of political plots. Within its boundaries was completed the conspiracy which resulted in the foul murders of the Empress of Austria and King Humbert. Other crimes of a like nature are promised us. All this is well known to British and Continental statesmen. And the sleuth-hound pertinacity and fanatical zeal of those sectaries should, now, at least, convince them that the time has arrived for combined, simultaneous, energetic, and unceasing action by the several States — in Bismarck's words — to ' hunt down like rats ' and stamp out those criminal associations whose purpose it is to destroy that social order which it is the first function of every Government to maintain.