Denton and Haughton Examiner, etc. — 1887-06-04 (Denton, Greater Manchester, England)

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. AU the sons of the Czar Paul 1.. like that unhappy monarch himself, who was murdered in 1801, became subject to fits of insanity. Paul I. had four sons—Czar Alexander 1, the Grand Duke Constantine, Czar Nicholas 1., and the Grand Duke Michael. Every one of them, after his 45th year, exhibited undoubted signs of mental derangement. This was not fully discovered, in the case of Nicholas 1., 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 bad 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 sixty years of age, and every one of them suffered from congestion of the brain after reaching his forty-fifth year. Alexander I. died when he was forty-eight years old a miserable man, moody and despondent, 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 reins of Government. His conduct in the year 1830, at the outbreak of the revolution in Warsaw, will remain as the historical justification of his intellectual unsoundness. If he had become Czar he would probably not have escaped the fate of his brother; and, as it was, he had to be entrusted to the care of his wife, the Princess Lowicr., 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 52nd year from congestion of the brain. The Grand Duke Michael was killed by a fall from his horse at the age of forty-eight. Some years before his death he bad exhibited signs of Undoubted mental disease, so that one of his physicians did not hestitate 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 Nichols., upon the bent of whose will the fate of so many millions in Enrope were depending, and the diseased inward condition of his mind.  lAN