"Certainly the thing looked well. … [But next day, when the President attempted to open the session, a band of the Socialist members made a sudden charge upon him, drove him and the Vice President from the House, took possession of the tribune, and brought even the semblance of legislative proceedings to an end. Then a body of sixty policemen was brought in to clear the House.] Some of the results of this wild freak followed instantly. The Badeni government came down with a crash; there was a popular outbreak or two in Vienna; there were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague, followed by the establishing there of martial law; the Jews and Germans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed; in other Bohemian towns there was rioting—in some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs—and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on. We are well along in December now; the new Minister-President has not been able to patch up a peace among the warring factions of the parliament, therefore there is no use in calling it together again for the present; public opinion believes that parliamentary government and the Constitution are actually threatened with extinction, and that the permanency of the monarchy itself is a not absolutely certain thing! "Yes, the Lex Falkenhayn was a great invention, and did what was claimed for it—it got the government out of the frying-pan." _S. L. Clemens (Mark Twain), Stirring Times in Austria (Harper's Magazine, March, 1898)._ AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897 (December). Imperial action. On the last day of the year the Emperor closed the sittings of the Austrian Reichsrath by proclamation and issued a rescript continuing the "Ausgleich" provisionally for six months. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1898. Prolongation of factious disorders. Paralysis of constitutional government.