.

Vienna is not like Petrograd where the thousands of eyes of the Nevski
Prospect have been put out and squads of dead shops stare at one from
smashed windows and gutted interiors. And it is not a vast
caravanserai for sufferers like Constantinople. Something, however, is
wrong and has been wrong and will be worse, and this something has
power to strike the imagination of every one who visits the great city
of Vienna. It is perhaps the contrast of luxury on the one hand and
black bread on the other, and the almost fabulous descent of the crown.
Wrangel's officers use hundred-rouble notes for shaving-papers, and
Americans in Vienna behave as unceremoniously with crowns. The lower
denominations of the rouble are much cheaper than the price of paper,
and the Austrian crown is going that way.[1]

This depreciation of the currency strikes the mind of the visitor to
Vienna, and from it he deduces the general ruin of the country. He
sees the shabby condition into which imperial palaces and State houses
are falling, and talks with the aristocratic or cultured _nouveau
pauvre_ carrying his lunch of sausage and black bread to a gloomy
apartment at the back of a fourth floor, and he feels the calamity that
has fallen upon Austria. Austria with a nominal 2800 crowns to the
pound sterling cannot last. How then about Poland with 4000 marks to
the pound--an Allied country with a close understanding with France?
But nobody in Vienna can understand how Poland lives.

The true inwardness of Vienna's calamity seems to lie in the fact that
she is the capital of a very badly governed country. Much could
obviously be done in little Austria by an honest, intelligent, and
industrious administrative staff. But they prefer to stand in the way
and beg, the giant Vienna and the dwarf Austria, staggering the
imagination of pilgrims, and whining for alms to passers-by.

By all accounts there is not even the will to govern well and make the
new Austria into a going concern. Hence arises the economic problem of
Austria, which is certainly grave. Here is a State which persistently
refuses to live on its income, and prints off paper money to make up
its deficiency. A highly expensive bureaucracy five times as large as
is needed for little Austria pays itself first, and as for the rest of
the population the devil can take the hindmost. The money-printing
press works night and day. No loans, no foreign dole, will stop the
operation of t