ave passed into a proverb. In
the last century their worse than worthless personalities filled nearly
every throne in southern Europe. They seemed to breed like wolves in
a famine-stricken land, and their fangs were at every people's throat
Fortunately they had vices. Wine and lechery did what human enemies
could not and the pack of wolves rotted away like a flock of diseased
sheep. The mortality was so regular that for a long time French kings
were succeeded by their grand-sons and great-grandsons, their sons all
burning themselves out before the time came for ascending the throne.
{40} The unutterably vile life of Louis XV. was terminated by the
smallpox communicated to him in the course of a most disgraceful amour.
His grandson, who succeeded him, had no destructive vices, and so
the people were compelled at last to resort to the guillotine to rid
themselves of him. The vast problem for the French in 1790 would have
been greatly simplified if Louis XVI. had been a shortlived debauchee
like his father and two brothers. The healthy German blood of his Saxon
mother corrected some-what the virus in the Bourbon veins, and he lived
to become an intolerable cumberer and obstructive.

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{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 prim