At Budapest you begin to suspect that you are in Europe; at Vienna you are sure of it--with its great array of fine shops, full of elegancies and delectable grandeur which leave Paris and New York in the shade. The whole press of Europe seems to have "written up" Vienna as "the ruined city" and "the end of a great capital," and even at Constantinople where terrible affliction was constantly before the eyes, the fiction held that Vienna was even worse. You are, therefore agreeably surprised to find the wheels of modern civilization running smoothly--a well-dressed, easy-going people on the streets and in the cafes, every business house working to full capacity, and all at first glance going well. The children, and especially those of the working class, look healthy and full of life. Starving Vienna seems somewhat of a myth. Vienna is not like Petrograd where the thousands of eyes of the Nevski Prospect have been put out and squads of dead shops stare at one from smashed windows and gutted interiors. And it is not a vast caravanserai for sufferers like Constantinople. Something, however, is wrong and has been wrong and will be worse, and this something has power to strike the imagination of every one who visits the great city of Vienna. It is perhaps the contrast of luxury on the one hand and black bread on the other, and the almost fabulous descent of the crown. Wrangel's officers use hundred-rouble notes for shaving-papers, and Americans in Vienna behave as unceremoniously with crowns. The lower denominations of the rouble are much cheaper than the price of paper, and the Austrian crown is going that way.[1] This depreciation of the currency strikes the mind of the visitor to Vienna, and from it he deduces the general ruin of the country. He sees the shabby condition into which imperial palaces and State houses are falling, and talks with the aristocratic or cultured _nouveau pauvre_ carrying his lunch of sausage and black bread to a gloomy apartment at the back of a fourth floor, and he feels the calamity that has fallen upon Austria. Austria with a nominal 2800 crowns to the pound sterling cannot last. How then about Poland with 4000 marks to the pound--an Allied country with a close understanding with France? But nobody in Vienna can understand how Poland lives. The true inwardness of Vienna's calamity seems to lie in the fact that she is the capital of a very badly governed country. Much could obviously be done in little Austria by an honest, intelligent, and industrious administrative staff. But they prefer to stand in the way and beg, the giant Vienna and the dwarf Austria, staggering the imagination of pilgrims, and whining for alms to passers-by.