The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. MONDAY, JUNE 29, 1914. ASSASSINATION.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIX, Issue 57, 29 June 1914, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. MONDAY, JUNE 29, 1914. ASSASSINATION.

Still yet another shocking tragedy is added to the long list of terrible happenings which have befallen the Austrian Royal House in the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and the Duchess, as recorded in our cablegrams to-day. The aged Emperor Francis Joseph, whose health has been giving his subjects grave concern, has been, do facto, head of the dual monarchy for sixtynine years, having already exceeded the remarkable reign of Queen Victoria. Francis Joseph was proclaimed Emperor of Austria in 1848, after the abdication of his uncle, Ferdinand I. Francis Joseph’s father, the Archduke Francis Karl, was the real heir, but he was unwilling to undertake the ruling of the vast heterogeneous Austrian empire. Ho renounced his right of succession in favor of his eldest son, who was then just over 18, and who thereby became Emperor of Austria 30 years earlier than if, in the natural course of events, he had succeeded his father instead of replacing him. While the Emperor Francis Joseph’s public life has been one of arduous toil and difficulty, his domestic life has boon throughout a, painful tragedy. His brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, bo,came Emperor of Mexico under the title of Maxmilia'n I. in 1864, was taken prisoner by his own people, and executed on a charge of treason in 1867. Maxinilian’s widow, the Empress Charlotte, a sister of the late King Leopold of the Belgians, is still living, but lost her reason after the tragedy. The Emperor Francis Joseph’s only son, the Archduke Rudolph, committed suicide in 1889 after shooting a young lady, with whom ho was in love. The greatest tragedy of the Emperor’s life occurred in 1898 when his wife, the beautiful and gifted Empress Elizabeth, was murdered by an anarchist. The heir-presumptive to the dual throne, the Archduke. Francis Ferdinand, the eldest son of the Emperor’s younger brother, the late Archduke Karl Ludwig, »wd his loan-

tiful wife have now fallen by the hand of the assassin, and though Francis Joseph, with kingly resignation and fortitude, has home the accumulations of sorrows which have been heaped upon him in the past, it is hardly possible to predict what this last terrible blow in the sweeping away of the Heir Presumptive will mean to him. So far as the throne is concerned, there also arises the complication that the late Archduke Ferdinand, on his morganatic marriage to the Countess Cholek, had to solemnly renounce the right of any children by this marriage to succeed as rulers of the dual monarchy.