On Monday morning the ex-German Empress Augusta- Victoria died of
heart disease. She was one of the most colourless and uninteresting women who ever sat on a throne. She does not even seem to have been able to make very much of her dreary role of Imperial " Hausfrau." This was the part for which the Emperor, with the instincts of a theatrical manager with an inefficient actress to provide for, had cast her. She did not even bring up her own children, who had English nurses till they were old enough to have drill sergeants. For her the Crown must have been a tragic ornament indeed. She lived the whole of her natural life with a haunting consciousness of her failure to live up to her strenuous and effective, if showy, husband. Her failure to make any impression at all on her surroundings, her failure even to make an enemy, leaves one with a sense of abject pathos. As the writer of her obituary in the Times points out, the war, the defeat of her country, and her own flight came as utterly incomprehensible and mean- ingless catastrophes, to which she was totally incapable of adjusting herself. She died in complete and tragic ignorance that the world had changed beneath her. But, at any rate, if her life showed nothing else it did show that despotism is an even greater tragedy for the despots than for the subjects.
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