THE ROYAL CASTE.
THERE are points about the Kings and Crown Princes of Europe—the "European family," as the Emperor Nicholas I. once described them—of whom we are just now hearing and seeing so much, that are not a little per- plexing. They discredit the wisdom alike of the physicists and the philanthropists. The Princes ought, for example, to be rather a rotten race, and they are not. They most of them—indeed, all of them except the Swede and the Servian—belong to families which have lived in great luxury for eight hundred years, which have in that period thrown up from time to time individuals of exceptional immorality, which have preferred intermarriage to any other method of seeking brides, and which ought therefore by this time to be thoroughly worn out. They are not worn out at all. They are rather good lives, as actuaries count lives, they would make a very fair troop of cr and they are personally rather more energetic, not tosay fussy, than other people. With the exception of the Spanish branch of the Bourbons, they have shown, and are showing, little sign of feebleness ; and even in that house the unexplained taint in the blood, which did not produce insanity but a mental and bodily incompetence, seems to be working itself out. We suppose their incessant cares, and the work which those cares compel them to do, have preserved the strength of the race, as they preserved that of the patrician families of Rome, who did not disappear, as people fancy, under the Empire ; but the fact is a little at variance with the current theories of heredity. So, also, is the other fact that the different lines, though none of them have been made competent either by adversity or asceticism, have produced rather more than their share of exceptional ability. No line of nobles has thrown up more competent men than the Hohenzollerns ; the Bourbons have produced at least three first-class soldiers ; the house of Hapsburg shows us Maria Theresa, her. son Joseph, the Archduke Charles, the Archduke Albrecht, and many another whose place in history is not due to flattery; while the Hohenzollems have made Ger- many, and the Romanoffs have built and preserved the autocracy which still affronts all political philosophy. Even Napoleon was foiled in the contest of guile by Alexander I., "that Greek of the Lower Empire ; and though Nicholas I. failed, and probably committed suicide, he was a terrible person with large ideas. They all, too, have manifested one singular power, which surely is equivalent, as power, to genius for command or administra- tive ability. They have all, even the comparatively un- distinguished Guelphs, contrived through ages of storm and stress to keep themselves at the top of the world, and preserve a sort of monopoly of initiative. They have been helped, no doubt, by advisers greater than themselves; but still, the capacity to profit by advice is not the mark of a decaying race.
On the other hand, the reigning " family " of Europe does not encourage the dreams of those who fancy that because animals can be bred to a certain point of per- fection, so a race ofmen, if well fed, fairly taught, well exercised, and employed in noble work, could be developed to a point which no section of mankind has yet reached. The conditions which should make such a race are the conditions under which the princely houses have been reared. They have all had. the best lodging and the best food procurable at the time, they have all been trained either as soldiers or sportsmen, they have all bad the means of acquiring knowledge, and they have all had inspiriting work to do. Yet they remain very like other people. The notion that they are when seen close inferior persons, whose repute has been produced solely by flattery, is a fiction invented by Republicans of the closet ; but they certainly have never reached any high and lasting level of ability such as must have distinguished the limited number of slave-holding families in Greece who gave to mankind Greek art, Greek literature, and Greek political thought. They are on the level for the most part of competent English squires, but not higher than that, though the importance of the questions with which they have had to deal has made them seem higher. Very few Princes have been original men, and the descendants of those few have, we think, without an exception slipped back to the ordinary level. It would be easy to draw up a list of greater personages who have been bred up in poverty or amid rather squalid surroundings. That does not prove that poverty and. squalor are good conditions to breed great men among, but it does prove that what are con- sidered good conditions will not of themselves produce them. You cannot, that is, breed a truly Royal caste.
We have used the word "caste," and no doubt in one way the Princes form a true caste; that is, they have been intermarried for hundreds of years, and have manifested a strong desire to protect their own superior claims of birth. But in another respect they are not a caste, and it is rather a puzzle to explain why they have not become one. They ought, properly speaking, that is, if science reveals anything about heredity, to have a definite stamp on them, to belong to an easily recognisable type of mankind ; and they do not. Though each house is supposed to have a separate face—the sameness is chieflyimaginary—the members of the caste hate no special likeness to one another even of a shadowy kind. There may be a personal likeness occasionally, indeed there is one—viz., that between the present Czar and the present Prince of Wales—but there is no more general similarity of type than there is in the House of Commons, where also accidental likenesses are very close. Look at the range of princely photographs which have recently appeared in the illustrated papers, and compare, say, the Crown Prince of Roumania, who is Hohenzollern, and the late King of Saxony. The latter suggests Tennyson's ideal squire, the former the typical thinking man. Nor is there, so far as we can read. history, any mental identity among them. All, no doubt, show the sense of superiority bred in them by their training, all—which is very curious—are nervously sensitive about their dignity, and all think a little more of the future than ordinary citizens do ; but there the simi- larity ends. Though they have all the same kind of business, the same kind of claims to reverence, and the same dangers to face, there is no professional cachet on them, such, for example, as comes upon soldiers and sailors, and, in a less degree, physicians. Difference of residence is no sufficient explanation of this, for the Jews are still more widely scattered and keep their type ; and we can only suppose that the position of a King so promotes individuality that no type, either physical or mental, has any fair chance of dominance. There are distinctions in the hind and the range of their authority, in the sort of work they have to do—the Emperor of Austria is neces- sarily a diplomatist, the Emperor of Germany a Commander- in-Chief, the Emperor of Russia a Judge—which tend to keep them separate from each other. We doubt if even the selfishness which Mr. Langton Sanford wrote an essay to prove inherent and inevitable in all Kings is by any means universal. As against any individual's claims it may be true, for a King is a. corporation, but as against the people it has often been proved by irresistible evidence to be false.
Selfishness, indeed, and patriotism are inextricably mingled in their minds, for that which injures the country necessarily injures them, and that which injures them almost as frequently hurts the country. But taking the whole range of character into consideration, the Kings are quite as unlike each other as any similar number of persons selected, out of the crowd would be. The one thing they are alike in is their failure to exhibit genius in any of its more ordinary manifestations. One sees reasons why, looking down, as they must look down,. upon mundane affairs from a kind of height, they should be philosophers ; but no Royal pen has added anything to the philosophies which have remoulded the minds of men. Gautama, indeed, was probably born in a ruling house, and Marcus Aurelius held the position of a Monarch ; but neither the Buddhist nor the Stoic was exactly a King in the modern acceptation of the word. One would think that a King might be a poet, and a great one ; but there is no poem by a Royal author which is above the fifth rank or which really lives in the memories of men. King David, whether he ever wrote any of the Psalms or not, was probably a considerable poet, else why should age-long tradition have affixed to him so improbable a character ? but. David, though he became a Sheikh, began life as a little yeoman. No King has ever been a great author, or a brilliant orator, or an architect, or a painter, or even a musician. It is with a sense of keen surprise, as of something alto- gether outside precedent, that men note in William IL of Germany the capacity to be all these things ; but even he has never so used his powers as to establish in any of these departments a claim to be what Julius Caesar was in military history, a writer of the first rank. Shyness may have something to do with it, for all Kings, Ambassadors tell us, are more or less shy ; but we fancy the true reason is that they have not cared for the effort, kingship making all other kinds of work seem small and unimportant. Still, in spite of an occasional phenomenon like William II., we cannot but think that one of the attributes of the kingly caste which has perhaps contributed to their safety and to the loyalty of their peoples has been want of originality. The peoples are very ordinary, and the Kings they like are men whom they are able to understand. One Great Mogul was a man of genius, as genius is commonly understood, and he was the only one who failed to keep his throne.
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