The king was dead; to his place succeeded his elder daughter, little Mercedes, Princess of the Asturias, during whose minority the queen–mother reigned as regent. For the seventh time in five hundred years a minor sat on the throne of Spain. The first of whom we have record was Ferdinand IV, at the beginning of the fourteenth century; he died young, and was succeeded by an infant son, Alfonso VI; at the end of that century there was another child–king, Henry III, from 1390 to 1406; and after him John VI, who reigned from 1406 to 1454; Charles II, who came to be king at the age of fourteen, in 1676; and Isabella, the age of three, in 1833. Child kings and queens, babes in arms enthroned in nurses’ laps, and unscrupulous regents during their minorities, seem to have been a Spanish evil! But the child queen Mercedes was not to reign long, for six months after the death of Alfonso XII the queen gave birth to a son, and this posthumous heir succeeded to the throne as Alfonso XIII, while yet unable to understand the fearful dignities that were thrust upon him. He was thus the eighth infant sovereign to rule Spain from the nursery within the past five centuries—perhaps may be the last; for as people grow older they are supposed to grow wiser; though all rules may have their exceptions, and perhaps the Spaniards are exceptions to all rules! Still, we can not withhold our admiration from a chivalrous sentiment, however foolish it may seem to sober sense; and when it was suggested to Emilio Castelar, the lion–hearted orator and statesman, that this might be a good time for a re–trial of the republic, he probably voiced the national feeling when he said: “We can not make war against a woman and a child!” That is the unthinking, sentimental side of it; but if the people had been brave enough to have said: “While we do not wish to war against a woman and her child, yet we will set this infant aside until he has shown what manner of man he becomes,” would it not have been far less cruel to her and to him, and more to the credit of a nation desirous of keeping pace with a progressive civilization? [Illustration] CHAPTER XXIII. SPAIN AND HER COLONIES. Although the present King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, is the great–great–grandson of Charles IV, Don Carlos V, the “pretender,” is also a great–grandson of that monarch, and has probably a more strictly legitimate claim to the throne than its occupant. Yet again, the mother of Alfonso XIII, the Queen–Regent Christina, although frequently alluded to by some of her subjects as “that Hapsburg woman,” can claim an unbroken line of descent from Isabella and Ferdinand, through Ferdinand I, second son of “Juana Loca” and Philip of Burgundy. Thus the ancestry of his maternal parent may be said to legitimize this titular King of Spain, while his posthumous birth “has excited a feeling of pitying loyalty which may help to secure the Bourbon dynasty in the last kingdom which is left to it.”[1]