ans no more than the congeries of States governed each separately
and all in combination by the head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.
Of these various States only one is German-speaking as a whole, and
that is the Austrian State proper, the "Eastern States" (for that is
what the word "Austria" originally meant) which Christendom erected
round the Roman and Christian frontier town of Vienna to withstand the
pressure of the heathen Slavs and Mongol Magyars surging against it
upon this frontier.

The complexity of the various sections which make up the realm of the
present Emperor Francis Joseph, the present head of the House of
Hapsburg-Lorraine, would be only confusing if it were detailed in so
general a description as this. We must be content with the broad lines
of the thing, which are as follows:--

[Illustration: Sketch 3.]

From the Upper Danube and its valley--all the basin of it, one may
say, down to a point about twenty miles below Vienna--is the original
Austrian State; German-speaking as a whole, and the historic centre of
the entire agglomeration. East of this is the far larger state of
Hungary, and Hungary is the valley of the river Danube, from where the
German-speaking boundary cuts it, just below Vienna down to the Iron
Gates, up to the crest of the Carpathians. These two great units of
Austria proper and of Hungary have round them certain frills or edges.
On the north are two great bodies, Slav in origin, Bohemia and
Galicia; on the south another Slav body, separated from the rest for
centuries by the eruption of the Magyars from Asia in the Dark Ages,
and these Slav bodies are represented by Croatia, by much of Dalmatia,
and latterly by Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have been governed by
Austria for a generation, and formally annexed by her with the consent
of Europe seven years ago. Finally, there is a strip, or, to be more
accurate, there are patches of Italian-speaking people, all along the
coasts of the Adriatic, and occupying the ports governed by Austria
along the eastern and northern coast of that sea. There is also a belt
of Alpine territory of Italian speech--the Trentino--still in Austrian
hands.

This very general description gives, however, far too rough an idea of
the extraordinarily complicated territories of the House of Hapsburg.
Thus, there are considerable German-speaking colonies in Hungary, and
these, oddly enough, are more frequent in the east than in the west
of that State. A