Newspaper Page Text
flow th« Skilful Court Photographer Touches Up
the Faces of the Melancholy Czarina and
the Weakling Czarewitch to Make
Them Look Strong and Normal.
How the Truthful Snapshot Reveals the Lines
of Mental Degeneracy and Weakness in
the Faces of the Czarina and Her
Unfortunate Only Son.
How Practical Eugenists Are Deriving Valuable
Lessons For Future Humanity From the
Rulers Who Hold Life
and Happiness of Millions
in Their Tainted Hands
By Dr. C. Ashton Palmer,
Grotesque Caricature Suggesting That the People of Europe Are
Being Crucified to Please the Fancies of Insane Rulers,
Forming Part of a Revolutionary Pamphlet
Seized by the Vienna Police.
equally mad Otto, now dethroned. As
the Bavarians lived from 1864 to 1913
under insane kings, it is sometimes
cynically suggested that it does not mat
ter whether a king Is mad or not.
The greatest burden cf hereditary in
sanity rests on the young Archduke
Charles Francis Joseph, nephew of the
Austrian Emperor, who was named heir
to the throne after the assassination of
Franz Ferdinand, that led to the present
war. He has 853 insane persons in twenty
generations among his direct and col
lateral ancestors. He is married to his
cousin, the Princess Zita of Bourbon-
Parma, who comes from the peculiarly
tainted Spanish Bourbon stock and is
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 taint 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
Terrible, the first celebrated Czar, mur
dered his only son, and was a maniac of
cruelty. \
Peter the Great, from whom the pres
ent Czar traces his descent, supplanted
an imbecile brother. The whole history
of the Romanoff family has been stamped
with madness an<f*murder. Peter’s niece,
Elizabeth, who continued the Romanoff
line, was a monster of cruelty. Her
grandson, Peter III., an imbecile, was
murdered by his wife, Catherine the
Great, in order to give her the throne.
Catherine’s son, Paul II., a low type of
idiot, was murdered with his son’s con
sent.
Since then we have found in every gen
eration of the Russian imperial family
such evidences of degeneration as
epilepsy and tuberculosis and many posi
tive cases of insanity. The Czar’s father
died of kidney trouble, an indication of
His next brother died
for her mental weakness, but it is notice
able that her nephew is the present King
Albert of Belgium, whose physical vigor
and splendid mental and moral qualities
have excited the admiration of the whole
world. His qualities must be mainly at
tributed to a sound mother of an unre
lated stock.
My own study of royal pedigrees has
led me to the conclusion that after the
union of a tainted person with a sound,
The Young Archduke Charles
Francis Joseph, Heir to the
Austrian Throne and the Most
Insanity - Tainted Farrrily in
Europe, with His Wife, Princess
Zita of Bourbon-Parma, the Only
Sane Child Out of Nineteen.
(And Below)
The Late Empress Elizabeth of
Austria, Who Brought the
Hereditary
Taint of
the Bavarian
Wittelsbachs
to Mix with
That of the /
Doomed 1
Hapsburgs.
•f the Eugenic Society of Great Britain.
T HE Insane and degenerate kings
and queens of Europe must be
made to furnlBh lessons for the
guidance of humanity and the produc
tion of better children in future.
That is the solemn conclusion of the
eugenists of Europe and America, in
spired by the tragedy of the war. They
have begun a meryileBS, scientific an
alysis off the tainted ancestry of the
rulers of Europe. They will tabulate all
the cases of insanity, all the defects, all
peculiarities of personal behavior as far
back as historical records go. They will
■how how the defects have been handed
down from generation to generation,
liow they have been intensified by inter-
^marriage, and what are the possibilities
/Of eliminating them by introducing fresh
Vlood and by other favoring conditions.
Scientists look at this subject mainly
from two points of view; In the first
t ace, they feel that the slaughter and
lseries of the present war have been
(brought about largely by the rule of ir
responsible kings of tainted ancestry.
Therefore, the kings and their ancestries
and their actions should be clearly held
lip for the Judgment of civilized Public
opinion.
In the second place, royal families of
fer an Infinitely better opportunity for
the study of eugenics than any other
families. Their records have been kept
Bhucb longer than those of other families
and they are full of authoritative de
tails, since ell historians have combined
to record every striking peculiarity of a
froya! personage.
One of the most valuable contributions
to this subject has been made by an
^American scientist. Dr. Frederick
Adams Woods, of the biological depar
tment of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, author of "Mental and
(Moral Heredity in Royalty."
Dr. Woods brings out the fact that the
Hapsburgs, the ruling family of Austria,
■re the most heavily burdened with In
sanity and taint of all the rulers con
cerned in the present crisis. They are
lie inheritors of what -he strikingly
terms “the frightful Bourbon-Hapsburg
psychoneurosis.''
From the days of the melancholiac
monster, the Emperor Charles, to the
mysterious death of the degenerate
Crown Prince Rudolph, in our own time,
the history of the house of Hapsburg has
been one long drama of blood and mad
ness, and the consequences to humanity
■re still showing themselves.
One of the most prolific sources of in
sanity was Queen Joanna the Mad, of
Spain, who married Philip of Austria
and became the mother of the Emperor
Charles V. of Austria and Spain, and of
his brother Ferdinand i„ who succeeded
him on the throne of Austria, while
Charles V.’s own direct descendants suc
ceeded in Spain. Joanna had many mad
■ancestors, including Pedro the Cruel, a
pnonster who Butchered his own relative*
Before the eyes of his court and tortured
■women to death because they did not tc-
icept his attentions readily.
^ The Emperor Charles V. married Isa-
11a of Portugal, who was a niece of his
id mother Joanna and "a granddaugh
ter of John the imbecile and Isabella the
insane. Thus by intermarriage the
theavy family taint was intensified in the
■tilers of Austria and Spain and in that
lof the Bourbons with whom the Haps-
ijurgs intermarried, lor centuries. In
The Insane Ex-Empress Carlotta
of Mexico, a Sister of the Late
King Leopold of Belgium.
"There is,” he says, "no degeneration
in modern royalty to be ascribed to their
exceptional and exalted position, per se.
“If we compare the eight hundred odd
persons who form the main body of this
study with the world in general, we can
not but be # struck with the relatively
large number of exceptional geniuses
who have from time to time appeared in.
their genealogical charts and have taken
their places as actual and undisputed
leaders in many of the greatest move
ments in European histcry.
“That is all to be expected. Men of am
bition seek power. In the generations
long ago, soon after the downfall of
Rome, in the age when modern royalty
was forming into a distinct class, the
natural leaders, the strongest, came to
the front and made themselves kings.
They married only among their own
kind. They waged wars one with an
other, leading to a survival of the fittest;
and all along down the line their ex
clusive ranks were recruited with fresh
grafts, alwayB in the nature of vigorous
personalities who won their way into the
royal fold. The very formation of royal
families was thus a question of selection
of the most able in government and war.
“The greater survival of the morally
superior and the correlation between
mental and moral qualities would, how
ever, always tend toward raising their
average if all be considered as a unit and
if all branches of descent be traced out,
though great and exceptional geniuses
might be less frequently expected.
“To the minds of some, a theory of tha
preponderant influence of heredity is
but a gloomy mnd pessimistic outlook.
“And yet this same view of heredity,
when looked at in its bearings on the
future condition of the human race as a
whole, far from being pessimistic, is on
the contrary an actual basis for optim
ism; for we have found among royal
families the morally superior surviving,
and In the inheritance of mental and
moral excellence we see ground for a
belief in the necessary progress of man
kind.
mental weakness,
of tuberculosis.
Czar Nicholas himself is a weak-minded
visionary, who takes the advice of magi
cians and soothsayers. His wife
evidently a melancholiac, a condition that
may be traced to the defects of her own
ancestry combined with her terror-pro
ducing surroundings in Russia.
Their only son suffers from a myster
ious disease which prevents him from
running about, and whenever he appears
in public he is carried. The Russian
court has employed all its influence to
conceal the nature of the disease or in
jury, and a hundred different reports
about it have been current.
The palaces of the Romanoffs, the
Hapsburgs and the Bourbons are, figura
tively speaking, filled with old spectres of
disease and madness that must come in
the night and moments of weakness and
distress to mock them with voices of
doom.
Among the many Insane royalties now
in seclusion one of the most pathetic is
the ex-Empress Carlotta, widow of Maxi
milian, the Austrian archduke who was
set up on the Mexican throne for a brief
period and then shot by his subjects.
Carlotta was a sister of the late King Leo
pold ot Belgium, whose peculiarities are
well known. Her father, King Leopold I„
had married a Princess of Bourbon-Or-
leans. daughter of King Louis Philippe of
France and granddaughter of the amaz
ing Duke of Orleans, the “Philippe Egal-
lte” 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 psycopathlc
Her Nephew, the Present King
Albert of Belgium, Whose
Heroic Character Has Ex
cited Universal Admiration,
Illustrating How the Fam
ily Taint May Complete
ly Disappear in a
Generation.
unrelated partner, the mental defects dis
appear in all but about one-fourth of the
descendants. In them, however, the de
fects persist strongly, and when such
persons mate with related stock we obtain
the well-defined Bourbon-Hapsburg type
of Idiot, with unsymmetrical features, pro
jecting underlip and indented upper lip
and other stigmata of degeneracy.
As it is an essential condition of the
royal system that its members should
intermarry, I am forced to believe that
they are all doomed to become insane.
Intermarriage outside the royal caste ap
pears to injure them in the esteem of
the common people of Europe.
Dr. Woods’s conclusions, though inter
esting, seem to me too optimistic to he
Justified by tfie facts,
Spain the taint showed itself In Charles
V.’s son. Philip II., a gloomy bigot and
melancholiac, who threatened to put to
death his own son Don Carlos, who him
self showed symptoms of Insanity. There
after for generations the kings of Spain
were mental and physical degenerates.
It is noteworthy that Charles V. had a
natural son, Don John of Austria, who
was the most famous general of his time,
showing that the introduction of one
healthy parent might produce good re
sults.
In Austria the more important branch
of the Hapsburg family continued to
propagate Idiots. Ferdinand had eleven
children. The fact that only one of these
showed the defects of her grandmother,
Joanna the Mad, is considered an illus
tration of eugenic principles. This son,
Maximilian II„ however, married a
cousin, who was also a grandaughter of
Joanna the Mad. and from this union
the results to be expected followed.
The results were: "Two children i,ub-
ject to melancholia, two eccentrically
slow and reserved, with the other five
ponu&l, A result to be expected, since