The last acquisition of territory by the house of Hapsburg was in the year 1908, when the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office boldly declared that Bosnia and Herzegovina, placed under the protectorate of Austria-Hungary by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, had been annexed to the Empire. The German Kaiser, standing by like a watching accomplice while the burglary was in progress, threatened a general European war if any nations protested.

At a time when Prussia was a struggling state, Austria was the dominant power in Central Europe, but the one battle of Sadowa in 1866 settled for ever the question of supremacy and the German States like Bavaria, Saxony, Würtemburg, etc., which stood with Austria in that war, after receiving a sound beating, ranged themselves on the side of the victor and, in 1870, joined in acclaiming the King of Prussia as the First German Emperor.

That event settled the question of leadership in Central Europe and the dream of the Emperor Frederick who died about the time of the discovery of America. It was he who wrote the famous anagram on the vowels A, E, I, O, U.

ustriastmperarerbiniverso
AEIOU
llesrdreichstesterreichnterthan
"It is the fate of Austria to rule the world."

In upper and lower Austria, so-called, there are about twelve million German Austrians. This territory is comparatively small and in it lies the city of Vienna. To the north and northeast lie Bohemia and Moravia, the country of the Tchechs or Szechs of Slavic blood. These people together number about six million. Prague is the capital of Bohemia, while in Moravia there is no great city. For centuries these peoples have been oppressed by the Austrians and in the Hussite rebellion the lands of Bohemia and Moravia were parcelled out to the Austrian nobles as well as to the warlike adventurers who had joined the Austrian armies.

With extraordinary obstinacy and patriotism these peoples cling to their old language and customs. They have suffered much during this war and many tales are told of the shooting of all of the officers of Tchech regiments and the execution of every tenth man among the privates.

It is a bit of poetic justice that the town of Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, where my friend Schwab is making so much war material to be used against the Central Powers, was founded by fugitives, who, rebelling against oppression, left Moravia in search of liberty.

North of the Carpathians lies Galicia, a Polish country, with Lemberg and Krakow as its capitals, and in the eastern part the Ruthenians, a race identical with the Russians. These Ruthenians number upwards of four million.

It is a peculiar fact that in the curious Dual Monarchy each race oppresses some other. The Ruthenians complain that they are oppressed by the Poles. The kingdom of Hungary lies to the east of Austria containing in its twenty million inhabitants about ten million Magyars, who are the dominant race and who in turn rule over a population of one and one-half million Ruthenians, two and one-half million Slovacks or Tchecks, three million Roumanians in the southeastern portion and about three million of the race now known as Jugo-Slavs. Of these Jugo-Slavs about two million are in that part of the Dual Monarchy under Austrian rule. These are the principal divisions of peoples. A Slavish race differing somewhat from the others is in the mountains to the east of Hungary where much fighting has taken place in the last war known as Boukovina. In the southeastern part of Hungary there is a German speaking country, known as Siebenburgen, where live the descendants of a German colony planted about two centuries ago.

In Styria, in the mountainous districts of Austria to the west of Hungary, lives a race differing again from all the others, a mountain race supposed to be eaters of arsenic, a drug which they believe gives them a good complexion and stamina for mountain climbing. It is said that the bodies of these arsenic eaters remain undecomposed for a long time. And from this part of the world comes the curious superstition of the existence of human vampires.