The transition to modern economic and social conditions is, nevertheless, well advanced. This is seen in a decrease of the agricultural classes and an increase of the industrial and commercial classes in the thirty years from 1869 to 1900. Another sign is the fairly strong differentiation of the economic-social classes, in both the agricultural and the industrial groups, which has advanced quite rapidly. The middle class, while neither as large nor as influential as in the countries of Western Europe, has played an important role towards hastening this transition. Politically, the Dual Monarchy occupies a middle ground between absolutist Russia and constitutional England. The court, the nobility and the Roman Church with its strong aristocratic leanings, represent the dominant power in Austria. The economic and social changes of the transitional period have been accompanied by politico-economic struggles which have played a vital part and have cut through and across the racial, national and religious conflicts of this much-distracted conglomeration of peoples. Amid the confusion of parties, with their complexity of programs, may be distinguished the German-Austrian liberals, representatives of the middle class or industrialists, whose historic mission was to create a modern state in Austria, and who carried out, in large measure, their program of constitutionalism, economic freedom and the secular state. Against them were arrayed the powerful forces of the agrarian party or the landed aristocracy--the upholders of the feudal economic-social order of privilege and class distinction, the clericals--the upholders of the idea of the Christian State--and the representatives of the lower middle class, composed chiefly of petty artisans and traders, whose ideal was the medieval industrial organization, largely co-operative and regulated, as opposed to the individualistic and competitive system of the modern era, with its great concentration of wealth, capital and power in the hands of the middle class. That the present structure of Austria is so much of a compromise and crosspatch between modern and medieval economic, social and political forms, and contains so much that is essentially incongruous, is due largely to the successful struggle which the chief parties of the medieval order--the feudal-clericals--the party of the upper classes, and the Christian Socialists--the party of the lower classes--have waged against the growing constitutionalization, industrialization and secularization of Austria--in short, against the transformation of Austria into a modern state.