The Birmingham age-herald., 1915-06-13

equally mad Otto, now dethroned. AS
 the Bavarians lived from 1864 to 1918
 under insane kings, it is sometimes
 cynically suggested that it does not mat
 ter whether a king is mad or not.
 The greatest burden Of hereditary in- sanity rests on the young Archduke 1 Charles Francis Joseph, nephew of the | Austrian Emperor, who was named heir l to the throne after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, that led to the present war. He has S53 insane persons in twenty I generations among his direct and col ! lateral ancestors. He Is married to his l cousin, the Princess Zita of Bourbon Parma, who comes from the peculiarly tainted Spanish Bourbon stock and is l said to be the only sane child of nineteen. A large number of them are certainly under some kind of tutelage. The out look for the children of these two is ap- palling.
 { No important reigning family in Europe is free from the talnt of insanity. It has shown itself with great frequency in the Russian Imperial family, suggest ing that surroundings combine with heredity to produce the defect Ivan the 1 Terrible, the first celebrated Czar, mur dered his only son, and was maniac of cruelty.
 Peter the Great, from whom the pres A ent Czar traces his descent supplanted an imbecile brother. The whole history of the Romanoff family has been stamped I with madness and murder. Peters niece, Elizabeth, who continued the Romanoff T line, was a monster of cruelty. Her
 grandson, Peter H., an imbecie was
 murdered by his wife, Catherine the
 Great, in order to give her the throne
 Catherine's son. Paul H., low type Of
 idiot, was murdered with his sons con-
 sent.
 Since then we have found in every gen.
 eration of the Russian imperial family
 such evidences of degenoration as
 epilepsy and tuberculosis and many posi-
 tive cases of insanity. The Czar's father
 died of kidney trouble an indication of
 mental weakness His next brother died
 of tuberculosis.
 Czar Nicholas himself is a weak-minded visionary, who takes the advice Of magi-
 clans and soothsayers. His Wife IS vidently melancholiac, condition that lay be traced to the defects of her own ncestry combined with her terror-pro- ucing surroundings in Russia
 Their only son suffers from myster- ous disease which prevents him from unning about, and whenever he appears n public he is carried. The Russian ourt has employed all it's influence to conceal the nature of the disease or in- ury, and hundred different reports bout 1t have been current.
 The palaces of the Romanoffs, the 1apsburgs and the Bourbons are, figura- lively speaking, filled with old spectres of disease and madness that must come in he night and moments of weakness and distress to mock them with voices of loom.
 Among the many insane royalties now n seclusion one of the most pathetic is he exEmpress Carlotta, widow of Maxi milan, the Austrian archduke who was set up on the Mexican throne for brief period and then shot by his subjects. carlotta was sister of the late King Leo- oold of Belgium, whose peculiarties are we'll known. Her father, King Leopold l., lad married Princess of Bourbon-Or- cans, daughter of King Louis Philippe of France and granddaughter of the amaz- ng Duke of Orleans, the Philippe Egal- te' of the Revolution, who voted for his cousin, King Louis XVI.'s death in order to save his own property King Louis Philippe intensified the psycopathic strain by marrying cousin of the branch of BourbonSicily.
 Carlotta, therefore, had much to account