lve hundred feet thick.

Most of the manufactured products are for home consumption. American
cotton and home-grown wool supply the greater part of the textiles. The
flour-mills are equipped with the very best of machinery, and much of
the product is for export to Germany and the countries to the south. The
manufactures that have made the state famous, however, are gloves and
glassware, both of which are widely exported. The sand, fluxes, and
coloring minerals of Bohemian glassware are all peculiar to the region,
and the wares, therefore, cannot be imitated elsewhere. The gloves are
made from the skins of Hungarian sheep and goats.

The railways are not well organized, and the mileage is insufficient for
the needs of the country. Ludwig Canal (in Germany) connects the Danube
with the Main, a navigable tributary of the Rhine; the Elbe is navigable
from a point above Prague to the Baltic; the Moravian Gate opens a
passage from Vienna northward; the Iron Gate, through which the Danube
flows, is the route to the Black Sea; Semmering Pass and its tunnel is
the gateway to the ports of the Adriatic. These great routes practically
converge at Vienna, which also is the great railway centre of the
empire.

The foreign trade consists mainly of the export of food-stuffs (of which
sugar and eggs are heavy items), fine cabinet ware, woollen textiles
(made from imported wool), barley and malt, and fine glassware. Much of
the German and Italian wine is sent to market in casks made of Austrian
stock; the coal goes mainly to Italy. The imports are raw cotton from
the United States and Egypt, wool, silk, and tobacco. Coal is both
exported and imported. The United States sells to Austria-Hungary
cotton, pork, and corn--buying porcelain ware, glassware, and gloves,
amounting to about one-fifth the value of the exports.

_Vienna_, the capital, is the financial centre and commercial
clearing-house of central Europe; it has also extensive manufactures.
_Budapest_ is the great focal point of Hungarian railways and commerce.
_Prague_ controls the coal, textile, and glass trade of Bohemia.
_Lemberg_ is the metropolis of Galicia. The states of Liechtenstein,
Bosnia, and Herzegovina are commercially under the control of Austria.

=The Lower Danube States.=--Roumania and Bulgaria, the plain of the lower
Danube, are enclosed by the Carpathian and Balkan ranges. They
constitute a great wheat-field whose chief commercial outlets are the
Iron Gate