of hereditary succession and divine right, they have been content to let each province or kingdom remain as it was when acquired, an isolated Crown dependency. They have not put forth serious and persistent efforts to weld the Tyrol, the Austrian duchies, Bohemia, Galicia, much less Hungary, in one compact realm. They have done even worse. They have committed repeatedly a blunder which the Hohenzollerns, even in their darkest days, never so much as dreamed of--namely, the blunder of hounding down one province or race by means of another. They have used the Germans to crush the Bohemians, the Poles to thwart the Germans, the Hungarians to check all the others, and the Croats to defeat the Hungarians. From this has resulted a deplorable conflict of races. The present emperor, Francis Joseph, appears to the eye of the close observer a man bent beneath the hopeless task of reconciliation. He is called upon to bear the accumulated evils of centuries of misrule. Vienna is a faithful reflex in miniature of Austria in general. The heedless or untrained tourist, misled by names and language and the outward forms of intercourse, may pronounce the city a most delightful German capital: he may congratulate himself upon the opportunity it gives him of reviving his reminiscences of the old German emperors and contrasting their times with the present. But the tourist, were he to go beneath the surface, would discover that he is treading upon peculiar ground. We have only to scratch the Viennese to find something that is not German. We shall discover beneath the surface Hungarian, or Slavic, or Italian blood. A very large portion of the population, perhaps even the greater portion, speaks two, three or four languages with equal facility. New York excepted, no great city will compare with Vienna for medley of speech and race. The truth is, that the city still retains its early character as a frontier-post, or, to speak more correctly, it is the focus where the currents from North-eastern Italy, South-eastern Germany, Bohemia, Galicia and Hungary converge without thoroughly intermingling. The conventional German used by the middle and lower classes is interspersed with terms borrowed from the other languages, with dialectic idioms, provincialisms and peculiarities of pronunciation that cause it to sound like an unfamiliar tongue.