26 APRIL 1935, Page 32

MODERN AUSTRIA

By Cicely Hamilton

Miss Hamilton is a practised writer on contemporary Europe. She has already dealt with Russia, Italy, France, and what she calls " Modern Germanies " before coming to the subject of this book. Austria is small but has been the core of an empire which claimed to be the heir of Rome ; her armies kept the Turk out of Western Europe ; her capital was the centre of a culture often more real if less self-conscious than Paris, and towards the end of the eighteenth century her rulers carried out an experiment in enlightened despotism which is of particular interest in this age of latter-day dictatorship. If Miss Hamilton has not much to say of the Old Austria, she is full of bright, chatty information about the New and does not omit to stress its tragic importance as Europe's latest cockpit. The country is about the size of Ireland and poverty has left the Wienerwald almost as unsophisticated as the Dublin Mountains. That is a good tonic for depression, as is the news that impecunious Vienna spent as much as London on education in 1931 and much more than her own city fathers had done in the more pros- perous, imperialist days. Visitors to Austria will not regret taking this book (Dent, 7s. 6d.) with them as a companion to Baedeker. The student of polities or history may regret that there is not more detailed treatment of the position of the Catholic Church and its relations with the Italian Govern- ment and the ex-Empress Zits; of the beautiful baroque architecture of .Austria ; and of the possibilities of some. sort of economic' union which will heal the feud with the. Succession States and replace that invaluable " ramshackle " empire which Mr. Lloyd George derided in his prehistOrian period. The book is embellished by some useful pictures but lacks index, maps and bibliography. -