During the more than eighty years of peace which Sweden has enjoyed under the rule of the Bernadotte dynasty, she has developed her constitutional liberty and her material prosperity in a high degree. The dreams of glory by conquest belong to days gone by, but in the fields of peaceable industries she has attained a greatness which the world begins to realize. At the expositions of Paris in 1867, 1878 and 1889, of Vienna in 1873, of Philadelphia in 1876 and of Chicago in 1893, Swedish industry and art have taken part with honor in the international competition. The railways of Sweden have incessantly spun a more and more extended network of steel over the country, opening connections for enterprises in new districts and furthering commerce and industrial art in a wide measure. Oscar II. is an enthusiastic friend of railway improvements, the state having built and acquired a quite considerable length of road at his initiative. The length of Swedish railways, in 1896, was 6,145 miles, of which 2,283 miles belonged to the state, compared to a total of 1,089 miles of Norwegian railways. The post-office, which was made a government department by Axel Oxenstierna, in 1636, annually transmits 130 million letters and parcels. The telegraph lines have not reached a very high state of development; still there are 14,600 miles of telegraph. The telephone has made much more progress, far surpassing that of any other country in Europe. The total length of the connections exceeds 40,000 miles, and the number of apparatus is more than 25,000. Stockholm makes the widest use of the telephone of any city in the world, with her 300,000 inhabitants having a telephone for every thirty. Sweden has developed into a commercial country of no inconsiderable rank, notwithstanding her isolated position. Exports and imports each exceed yearly in value $100,000,000, the imports being 344,290,000 kronor and the exports 311,434,000 kronor in value, in 1895, a Swedish krona being about twenty-eight cents. The commercial value of the foreign trade amounts to thirty-nine dollars in yearly average for each inhabitant of Sweden, which is about as much as in France. The imports chiefly consist of coal, coffee, salt, cotton and wool, while the exports are timber products, about forty per cent of the whole, iron and steel, the best in the world, machinery, butter, cattle, matches, etc. The inland navigation and commerce are very lively. The state finances are in a prosperous condition. The budget of 1898 showed total receipts of 120,086,000 kronor, of which 14,229,000 was surplus from proceeding budgets.