SPAIN: Alfonso the Great?

Today not a single king or emperor is acclaimed “The Great.” How many want to be? Are any trying for the title? Last week as Spain’s lively, cavaliering Alfonso XIII sunbasked at smart Biarritz, he tossed a sort of answer to pert Coralie van Paassen, of the New York Evening World. “If it could be done,” smiled His Majesty, “I would like to follow the example of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great.” (1672-1725).

Peter tore the capital of Muscovy from Moscow and planted it at St. Petersburg which he had created on a marsh. Peter gave his people the Cyrillic alphabet which seven-tenths of them have not yet mastered. He introduced tobacco and knouted any courtier who did not take to a pipe. Finding the women of Russia cooped Asiatically in harems, Peter dragged them out with a ukase. Fancying a lowly laundress whom soldiers called Katinka, he made her the Tsarina Catherine I. He decreed a new calendar. With knowledge won by toiling incognito as a shipwright in Holland he built Russia’s first effective navy. On land he defeated Charles XII of Sweden, most potent warrior of the age, at blood-drenched Pultava. But Peter I was a moody, discontented man. “Whose son am I?” he roared one day from the Throne. “Yours, Tihon Streshnief ? Speak or I will have you strangled!”

“Mercy, mercy, Sire!” begged Courtier Streshnief (according to Historian Dolgoroukov). “How can I tell? I was not the only one!”

Tsar Peter, perhaps to spare his son, the Tsarevitch Alexius, such pangs of doubt, had the boy murdered. He also decapitated one of his mistresses, Mary Hamilton, and delivered an anatomical lecture on her head. Withal, savage Peter was called “The Great.” Last week on the white sands at Biarritz it remained incumbent upon Spain’s fashionably tanned Alfonso XIII to state clearly which of Peter I’s gargantuan examples he would like to follow “if it could be done.”

Chatting over a cocktail His Majesty envisioned himself “working away in some big American automobile factory . . . like the Tsar Peter . . . who traveled incognito all over Europe and who did not shirk from taking a job in Dutch and English shipyards to get acquainted with the latest developments.”

“It’s a good thing to do for a king!” added King Alfonso. “My idea of the kingship is that the monarch must set the example. . . . There are always plenty of people who will occupy themselves with diplomacy and foreign relations and make that their specialty. I am inclined to let them have a free hand. . . . My inclinations are towards industry and the development of Spain. . . . I am a worker. . . . The idea that a King is a man who lives in a beautiful house surrounded by silk-dressed valets and plumed lackeys, fine soldiers and such sort of people—a kind of touch-me-not—is antiquated.”

Asked when he would like to visit the U. S., assured that he could work in an automobile factory if he wanted to, Worker Alfonso XIII replied: “I am going some day. When that will be I cannot tell. I am just like millions of Europeans to whom America is a sort of dreamland. Every time I open an American newspaper or magazine and see photos of those marvelous skyscrapers and broad streets and that tremendous industrial activity, I sigh to myself and wish I were there.”