iries of
the late Prince Alexander of Battenberg. William in this letter does
not talk of "requesting" his brother, but of ordering him to do this.
If then William, as crown prince, already took upon himself the right
of ordering his brother and his sisters to do this and to do that, it
may be readily imagined that he is not less peremptory in his dealings
with them now that he is their emperor and king.

If they disobey him, he has various means of punishment at his
command. He can banish them from court for a long term; he can
deprive them temporarily, or for all time, of the prerogatives, the
privileges, and the honors due to their rank; he can suspend their
allowances from the national treasury, or from the family property,
or can stop it altogether; he can take from them the control of any
estates which they may have inherited, and confide the administration
thereof to curators appointed for the purpose; finally, he can subject
them to various forms of arrest, as he once did in the case of his
brother-in-law, Prince Frederick-Leopold; while in very extreme cases
he can place the offending relative under restraint in an asylum for
the insane on the pretext of dementia, as has been done in the case
of Princess Louise of Coburg, daughter of King Leopold of Belgium,
and mother of Princess "Dolly" of Coburg, who is now the wife of Duke
Ernest-Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein.

"_Aux arrets_," or confinement to one's quarters, is the most common
form of punishment inflicted by Old World monarchs upon those of their
kith and kin who have failed to comply with their behests, and there
is scarcely a single sovereign or prince of the blood, who has not
been subjected to this species of discipline at one time or another of
his career. Thus the late Emperor Frederick, prior to his accession
to the throne, but long after his marriage, was sentenced to several
weeks' detention in his palace under strict arrest, as a punishment
for a little joke which he had played during the course of a military
inspection.

He had been protesting for a long time against the tightness of the
uniforms, and of the belts of the rank and file of the infantry,
declaring that it impeded the movements and play of the muscles of the
men, to such an extent as to deprive them of more than fifty per cent,
of their usefulness. One day, during an inspection of the division of
guards at Potsdam, while the troops happened to be standing at ease,
he walked alo