"Peering into the future, some of us are worried. There is trouble aplenty in the present, but the future holds a problem so difficult a solution, yet so grimly fascinating that those unfortunate enough to have thought of it can't dismiss it from their minds.
When this war is over, what is going to happen to royal matrimony? For years, for decades, the reigning royal families have been drawing into closer relationships.
It has been an interlocking directorate on a regal and splendid scale. Kings are cousins, nephews, or great uncles by marriage to other kings, princes, or grand-dukes. Queens have had to learn six languages in order to talk with their own grandchildren.
Every now and then some obscure ruler, usually Balkan, gets into the newspapers and it is a puzzle to everybody until someone says: "Oh, yes: he's a Cousin German to the Czar; don't you remember?" or, "He's a foster brother-in-law of the Kaiser's" and then it is all clear again.
It has been impossible for kings to meet without kissing. And every royal wedding, or funeral, has been an affectionate family reunion.
So much for the past; and in view of the sweeping character of the present war, it is one of the fastest pasts on record. But consider the future. When the war is over, and the cannon cause from troubling, where are princes to find suitable wives?
And whence are to come to the correct thing in husbands for the princesses. Nor more German matrimony for England; that goes without saying.
No more English matrimony for Potsdam and Co. Nothing doing in Russia; Petrograd, late St. Petersburg, suggests that. Austria hasn't a friend in Europe, except Germany, and may have to go to Asia hereafter for brides and bridegroom.
The Queen of Holland has only one child, and while Spain's crop of young royalty is all that could be desired, it can't supply all of Europe.
If the details of selection were left to the young people themselves, royalty would have no more trouble than common folk; but where royal fathers and imperial advisors have the say, matrimony which was difficult enough of arrangement before the war, will it become inconceivably more difficult when the war is concluded and royal fathers "do not speak."
Even the desperate expedient of marrying for love is among the possibilities."
Puck magazine was established by German-Americans, and originally published in English and German editions in 1871. William Randolph Hearst bought the English edition and continued to publish Puck, a humor magazine, until 1918.
1 comment:
Well they were a generation early for marrying commoners but it is interesting that Denmark, Norway and Belgium looked to Sweden and the Balkans tended to intermarry. England almost stopped marrying royalty altogether.
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