The great and important use (right or wrong) to which a modern royal house is put is that of supplying the vast mass of the nation with a sort of enduring romance- a romance not differing at all in proportions from their own romances, but only differing in scale, only differing in the fact that it is well known to all....Ten million readers can follow the life of King Alfonso and his wife exactly as ten million readers could follow the life of Sir Alured Fitzthunderbolt and his wife in the serial story of a popular magazine. In a word, what advantage there is in the method is a wholly emotional advantage. The public use of a royal family is not merely that it is royal, but that it is a family....the life of a royal family is not...a public life. It is only a private life- lived in public.

-June 23, 1906, Illustrated London News