We owe to a popular writer the assertion that there is something fundamentally different in character between the East and the West, which makes mutual understanding difficult and assimilation impossible. The English traveller who is inclined to accept this axiom may begin to detect the Eastern flavour of things as soon as he leaves the frontier of the German Empire behind him and passes through the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy on his way to Constantinople. Monarchs and statesmen may come and go, laws may be promulgated and the ballot-box may be adopted, but the character of a people is not materially changed even by such measures as compulsory education and universal military service. The East has adopted some of the machinery of Western life, but the Eastern remains an Eastern still. Institutions unsuited to a people’s traditions and character may only jeopardize its fortunes: A thousand years scarce serve to form a State, An hour may lay it in the dust: and when Can man its shattered splendour renovate, Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate? _Childe Harold_, Canto xi, stanza lxxxiv. Should you arrive at Vienna on a Saturday, you will have to wait there twenty-four hours if you intend to take the Orient Express to Constantinople, for it leaves Vienna on Sunday evening, and even in that short time you may feel a subtle change in the atmosphere of life. You ask a sedate-looking official in the bureau of your hotel up to what o’clock on Sunday morning the shops in the town remain open, as you want to purchase a few travelling necessaries. “Till mid-day, sir,” is the decisive reply. Instinctively warned by past experience, you turn to the hallporter, who usually embodies the brain power of a Viennese hotel, and in order to make sure you put the same question to him. “The shops are not open at all, sir, on Sundays,” is his reply: and so indeed it turns out to be. You stroll towards the Leopoldstadt with the intention of taking lunch at the old “Goldener Lamm,” now called the Hotel National, long renowned as the hostelry patronized by European crowned heads as far back as the Vienna Congress in 1815. You grip the brass handle of a glass door on which the inviting word “Entrée” is affixed in large white enamelled letters. You tug at it in vain and are ultimately warned off by a man signalling frantically from the inside that it is not a door at all, but only the window of an apartment—and that the real entrance to the Hôtel is a few yards to the left. You now recollect that when you were there last—some seven years previously—that blessed word “Entrée” was already there, and that you—and doubtless many others ever since—were warned off, the proprietor not having deemed it worth while to do away with the misleading letters.