By every possible arrangement of facilitation and cheapening, a visit to the Exposition was placed within the means of all the inhabitants of the kingdom; and especial provision was made for bringing schools and teachers to receive the object-lessons which it taught. Among the ceremonies which attended the ending of the great national festival, was the formal opening, at Orsova, of a ship channel through the rocky obstructions that have been known since the days when they troubled the Romans as the "Iron Gates of the Danube." AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897. Industrial combinations. See (in this volume) TRUSTS: IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897. The forces of feudalism and clericalism in Austria. Austrian parties in the Reichsrath. Their aims, character and relative strength. Count Badeni's language decrees for Bohemia. "In no European country have the forces of feudalism and clericalism such an enormous influence as they have in Austria. The Austrian nobility is supreme at Court and in the upper branches of the Administration. In Hungary the small nobility and landed gentry exercise a preponderating influence, but they are a wide class and filled with the national spirit. The Austrian nobility forms a narrow, intensely exclusive and bigoted caste, whose only political interest is the maintenance of its own class supremacy. The large Protestant element in Hungary has in no small degree contributed to the success of the Magyars, both in its effect on the national character and by the secondary position to which the mixture of creeds has relegated the Church. In Austria the Church of Rome is all-powerful. The House of Habsburg has always been bigotedly Catholic: Francis Joseph himself was a pupil of the Jesuits. The triumph of the reaction after 1848 was the establishment in 1855 of that 'written Canossa' the Concordat, which made the Church absolute in all matters relating to education and marriage. And even though the Concordat was got rid of in 1870, the energies of the clerical party have been but little weakened. The real explanation of the whole course of Austrian politics lies in the interaction of the two conflicts—of reaction, clerical or aristocratic, against liberalism, and of Slav against German. …