The mourning is universal and
genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday,
when the funeral cort`ege marches."
He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write concerning it.
He prepared the article which follows, but did not offer it for
publication, perhaps feeling that his own close association with the
court circles at the moment prohibited this personal utterance. There
appears no such reason for withholding its publication now.
A. B. P.
The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and
tremendous the event becomes. The destruction of a city is a large
event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in a thousand
years; the destruction of a third part of a nation by plague and famine
is a large event, but it has happened several times in history; the
murder of a king is a large event, but it has been frequent.
The murder of an empress is the largest of all events. One must go back
about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this one. The
oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in Rome and
traces its line back seventeen hundred years, but no member of it has
been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until now. Many
a time during these seventeen centuries members of that family have been
startled with the news of extraordinary events--the destruction of
cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the wreck of dynasties,
the extinction of religions, the birth of new systems of government; and
their descendants have been by to hear of it and talk about it when all
these things were repeated once, twice, or a dozen times--but to even
that family has come news at last which is not staled by use, has no
duplicates in the long reach of its memory.
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