Part 4

{41} The only Bourbon still remaining on a throne is the King of Spain, and his teeth are on edge from the sour grapes of unchastity which his fathers and mothers ate.

Like his grandmother, the notorious Isabella II, his father, aunts, and cousins, and indeed every one of the Bourbons, he is a sad physical weakling.

The physicians politely term “scrofulous diathesis” the syphilitic taint of the Bourbon blood. In his grandmother it showed itself in a repulsive cutaneous disease which she tried to ameliorate or cure in a truly Bourbon-ish way, by having her underclothing {42} previously worn by a nun of high repute for piety.

Alfonso’s XIII.’s father burned himself out at the age of 28. His aunts and kinsmen all had some one or more of scrofula’s varied physical degradations and deformities, and went out from time to time like ill-made candles.

Though the hopes of his race and the peace of his country depend upon Alfonso’s life, all the care given him in his boyhood could do no more than slightly mitigate the ancestral blight.

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{43} A FEW years ago the people of Holland were threatened with a most serious calamity. Depraved heredity, unwise sexual selection, or some other primal cause had resulted in the production, as the Prince of Orange--the Crown Prince--of an individual of a weak, inferior, and depraved nature. His was such a nature as on a throne becomes a fountain of numberless oppressions and evils, and rarely fails to goad the unhappy subjects into rebellion, attended with the usual frightful loss of life and property and vast sorrows. Fortunately he had destructive vices. The appetite for these led him to Paris. A few years of riot and {44} debauchery sapped away the dangerous life of “Lemons,” as his worthless boon-companions named him, and he died as the fool dieth. The only harm he was able to do was the indirect damage of a bad example, and the good people of the Netherlands were rid of a possible Louis XV. at no greater cost than that of some years of extravagant life in the French capital. His father’s evil excesses and penchant for pretty ballet-girls left as his only successor a young not over-strong girl, who thus far has failed to produce an heir to the throne, to the deep disappointment of such of her people as love royalty. Holland will, therefore, {45} in all probability, glide into a republic without the usual sanguinary convulsions attending such transitions.

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IT is the story of the Ages--old when the Pyramids were yet young; new to every generation. Hannibal’s victorious army found the “soft delights of Capua” far more deadly than Roman swords. That famous “Winter in Capua” wrecked the invaders, saved Rome, and ruined Carthage.

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{46} IN conspicuous contrast to the royal and aristocratic families just alluded to are the houses of Hohenzollern and Savoy.

A thrifty burgher of Nuremberg, eager to get into the landed aristocracy on any terms, foreclosed a mortgage on a stretch of most unpromising sand and swamp around Brandenberg. It was of so little worth as to be frequently spoken of as “the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire,” The Hohenzollerns

attacked this uninviting problem with real German thrift and tenacity. They resolved to make their swamps and sand barrens productive like the rich lands of their neighbors. {47} Flinching from no drudgery themselves, they would allow none of their people to do so. Every Hohenzollern son and daughter was brought up to unsparing hard work, severe economy, plain food and coarse clothing, with a rigid code of morals.

At the time when the example of Louis XIV. was debauching every German princeling into having a showy court with a pretentious palace and a tinseled retinue, all wrung from the poor peasantry, the King of Prussia was running his court after the manner of a close-fisted, land-gaining German farmer.

Cabbages that could not be sold {48} were served on the royal tables in order to save a few thalers for the support of the army, and add to the war chest.

The shabby appointments of the palace were the derision of Europe. The common people of Prussia had, however, a much larger share of what their labor produced than those of any other part of Europe. The King not only set a good example in making the most out of everything, but he personally caned lessons of industry and frugality into his people, high and low.

There were occasionally black sheep in even such a sternly regulated family, but as a general rule the sons and daughters married strong, clean mates, {49} and strictly maintained the family traditions. A provision against the way ward princelings was made by which their possessions passed into the main house if they fell below the standard. So the Hohenzollerns grew, and Prussia grew from a despised sandbarren to be one of the Six Great Powers of Europe, and is now the head of the mighty German Empire. We do not have as full history of the House of Savoy, but we have enough to know that in much the same way, at the same time, and by much the same moral discipline, it arose from the lordship of a little stretch of mountain {50} land in the Alps to rule over United Italy.

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THE most attractive feature of this self-pruning of the objectionable growths in society, as said before, is that the victims destroy themselves under the hallucination that they are drinking the richest wine of earthly pleasure. When execution can be made a matter of keen relish to the condemned, certainly nothing is wanting on the score of humanity.

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{51} I ANTICIPATE the objection that slaying bad men by means of their own vicious propensities brings much misery to those connected with them.

But then all innocent persons connected with bad men are fated to suffer in exact proportion to the closeness of the connection, whether the bad men are destroyed or not. Weak, selfish, perverted, and criminal men always inflict misery upon their relatives and associates. This is not usually intensified by their being drunkards or debauchees.

It is also true that no one of Nature’s methods of extinction is pleasant {52} to those connected with the victim. The thief or thug, prematurely dying with delirium tremens, is certainly quite as bearable a sight to those before whose eyes it may come as the spectacle of a virtuous man, the sole support of his family, slowly wasting away with consumption in spite of all that loving service and agonizing sympathy can do to retain for him a life that is of so much value.

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TO the next objection that the practice of vice is not invariably suicidal, since many rascals live to attain as {53} green an old age as the most righteous, it is sufficient to say that plentiful as these exceptions may occasionally seem, their proportion to the whole number is at least as small as that of the exceptions to any other general law of biology.

The policeman on the next corner will bear decided testimony that the number of scoundrels who survive their 30th year is astonishingly small, and he can point out any number of erstwhile troublesome members of the community who are ending their lives in penitentiary, poorhouse, or hospital at an age when well-behaved men are {54} just entering upon the serious business of life.

It is also demonstrable that the proportion of vicious men to the whole population is much less to-day than at any previous period in the history of the race. This shows conclusively the improvement of society by the self-destructiveness of vice. The proportion of bad men is rapidly diminishing, because bad men die sooner and propagate fewer than good ones. {55}

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