In his opening chapter Sir James Douie refers to the fact that the area treated in this volume—just one quarter of a million square miles—is comparable to that of AustriaHungary. The comparison might be extended; for on ethnographical, linguistic and physical grounds, the geographical unit now treated is just as homogeneous in composition as the Dual Monarchy. It is only in the political sense and by force of the ruling classes, temporarily united in one monarch, that the term Osterreichischcould be used to include the Poles of Galicia, the Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia, the .Szeklers, Saxons and more numerous.
