to no less than three months' close arrest in his quarters at Munich,
for having left the kingdom without permission, in order to spend
three days at Paris, in fair but frail company; while the widowed
Duchess of Aosta on one occasion was placed under arrest in her palace
of Turin by her brother-in-law, King Humbert, because she had ventured
to appear in public on her wheel wearing a pair of bloomers!

Prince and Princess Frederick-Leopold, the latter a younger sister of
the Empress of Germany, have both been condemned on several occasions
by the kaiser to close confinement in their palace under the most
stringent kind of arrest, for having disobeyed his majesty's commands
with regard to the management of their household. Duke Ernest-Gunther
of Schleswig-Holstein, the brother of the empress, has been subjected
to more numerous orders of arrest by his imperial kinsman than any
prince of the blood now living.

Severe as are European monarchs nowadays in punishing the disobedience
of the members of their families, they do not, however, venture any
longer to proceed to such extremities as the father of Frederick the
Great, who when the latter was still crown prince, cast his son into
prison, and ordered him to be shot, merely because he discovered
that he was about to leave the kingdom without his permission for the
purpose of undertaking a trip to England; and there is no doubt that
the crown prince would have been put to death, and thus shared the
fate of his two aids-de-camp, who were beheaded before his very
eyes, in the fortress prison of Küstrin, had it not been for the
intervention of the ambassadors of Austria, Great Britain, Russia and
France in behalf of his royal highness.

Yet another phase of this despotism, which the two kaisers,--namely