ABSTRACT
Sprawling eastwards from the Swiss Alps to the crests of the Carpathian mountains, crossing those mountains in the north-east and descending into the north European plains of Poland, in the north-west reaching to the lower forested mountains which separated it from Prussian Silesia and Saxony, spreading south-eastwards down the warm Adriatic coast and southwards over the snowbound high Alps into the fertile plain of northern Italy, stretched the second largest country in Europe. Within its boundaries in 1914 lived one-eighth of the continent's population. The centre of the country was the plain of Hungary, in the early nineteenth century one of Europe's main stock rearing areas, by the end of the century one of its major grain growing areas. The river Danube linked all the central parts of the country but it was not easily navigable upstream towards Vienna and Germany, and its mouth in the Black Sea was far from the main trade routes of Europe and not within the Imperial frontiers. The diversity of circumstance which had brought this vast area of almost every possible kind of terrain under the rule of the Habsburg family was preserved in the nineteenth century by a diversity of constitutional patterns and the Vienna government was never able to create from these territories a unitary and centralised state. The area is now divided between Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Italy.
