AUSTRIA

Republic of, one of the new divisions of Europe created by the outcome of the World War of 1914-18. Austria is a remnant of the once great Austro-Hungarian emire and was the center of its power; m fact, Austria, with Vienna, its capital, was the empire. Once a territory covering 115,822 square miles, Austria has now an area of only 30,766. With Germany as its neighbor on the west and north, Czecho-Slavakia on the north and east, Hungary on the east, Serbia and Italy on the south, she occupies an insignificant position in Central Europe when contrasted with the dominating place she formerly held in the territory of 261,259 square miles that constituted the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She has not only been reduced in area and population, but since the war has endured economic reverses that have been rarely, if ever, experienced by other countries. Her misfortunes have been largely due to the alienation of those of her neighbors who were in tergal parts of the dismembered empire. The areas of which Austria was deprived by the war's result were those on which Vienna and the manufacturing towns depended for their food, and the new provinces comprising these sections were averse to supplying Austria’s needs, having: troubles enough of their own. They held the means of communication into Austria, not only the seaports, but much of the railroads and the Danube. Austria became the most pre ing of European problems in the post-war era. Her capital contained 30 per cent. of her population, and the distribution of her people was thus unbalanced and difficult of economic adjustment. She had lost by the war an immense production and great fertile areas of food lands. Her currency collapsed and there was a breaking down of every economic function. Several European powers and banking interests, however, finally came to her aid in 1922 to rescue her from the fmminent danger she then faced of perishing as a national entity. The provision of substantial loans for stabilizing the currency (which had sunk so low that living costs rose to unheard-of heights and caused national starvation) and for rebuilding the economic structure at last gave promise that Austria would ultimately achieve normal conditions in her industrial and social life. There has even been ground for the hope that Vienna, once the empire’s financial and commercial center, will recover her busine activities when the bitterne of the war and post-war periods have le ened. American aid through the Relief Fund organized by Herbert Hoover was the most conspicuous feature of the efforts made to alleviate Austria’s distre . Her outlook, perhaps, has been bettered by the ruinous consequences of the war in that she has been freed from discordant racial elements and her peopie are now virtually homogeneous, a condition certainly favorable to social and political peace. As to her national activities in production and trade, Austria’s abnormal economic condition, in crippling them at their foundations, has reduced them to an insignificant place in her post-war history, Her population 1920, was about 6,000,000.