incorporated with the inner city in one municipal government,
were then small detached villages. From time to time the rayon was
encroached upon by enterprising builders, with the connivance of the
emperor or the garrison commander. The disastrous wars with France
at the end of the last century and beginning of the present were in
reality a gain to Vienna. Napoleon's bombardment and capture of the
city in 1809, before the battle of Wagram, demonstrated conclusively
that the fortifications were unable to withstand modern artillery.
Accordingly, after the general European peace had been established
by the Congress of Vienna, the city was declared officially by the
emperor to be no longer a fortification. But the walls and ditch, so
far as they had not been injured by the French, were still suffered
to remain: they were substantially intact as late as 1848, and were
strong enough to enable the revolutionists who had possession of
the city to hold it for forty-eight hours against the army of Prince
Windischgrätz.

The final reconstruction of the city was not begun in earnest until
1857, and occupied ten years or more. The walls were leveled to
the ground, the moat was filled in, a broad girdle-street (the
Ringstrasse) laid out to encircle the inner city, and the adjacent
ground on either side was converted into building-lots. In this brief
space of time Vienna was changed from a quasi-mediæval town to a
modern capital of the most pronounced type. The Ringstrasse became a
promenade like that of the old Paris boulevards, but broader, grander
and lined with palatial edifices no whit inferior to the French. The
metamorphosis is so startling that a tourist revisiting the city after
an absence of twenty years would have difficulty in persuading himself
that he was indeed in the residence of Maria Theresa, Joseph II. and
Metternich. No American city can exhibit a like change in the same