Economically, German-Austria is a poor country with a few prosperous rural districts and an imperial capital. Its agriculture produces between half and two-thirds per acre of the average German production. Its live stock is so depleted as to be practically destroyed. Its few factories and inferior railways are in worse condition even than the German, which is saying much. It has no coal supplies and no port. As to Vienna, it is difficult to say what will happen to it. It may have a future as the land-port of Germany on the east, as Hamburg is on the west, and as a commercial and financial centre for the new nations; but for the next few years it will be in industrial and financial liquidation, as the imperial banks and businesses reorganise and redistribute themselves among the nations. Vienna's machine, motor and railway works and the Alpine Montant Company with large iron ore deposits, are the most important assets that go with German-Austria. Of course, there are wealthy industrial districts and mineral deposits in German-Bohemia and the Sudetic country, but the question of their union with Germany is a different one. The Bohemian Republic is making a strong bid to the industrial "interests" of these German districts, which fear the competition of Saxony should they enter the German union. It will be interesting to see whether this alliance between plutocracy and diplomacy will avail to keep these German populations permanently in the Tchech State. But with the exception of a few dynastic, clerical and capitalistic interests, German-Austria is to-day German, not Austrian. You would have a better idea of the difference between German-Austria and the old Austrian Empire if you had visited Dr. Hartmann, the representative of German-Austria in the old Austrian Embassy in Berlin. There, in a palladian palace that was once a centre of the peculiar blend of courtly brilliance and corrupt brutality with which the Austrian Empire kept itself going, you found a modest rather melancholy don and a young secretary; looking like lost souls of a national democracy buried in the sarcophagus of imperialist diplomacy. But after a few minutes' talk you also found that these mild-mannered men represented that force that broke to fragments the Iron Crown of the House of Habsburg, and that will break its way to Union over the paper barricade of the Hall of Mirrors.