But the delicate touch of Hays's master hand has been felt in many a complicated State tangle-in California, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, and in many another. Always quiet, never offending, never dominating, but always winning.

And in Washington what a depressing maze to travel through! But Gillett is Speaker, and that is something. And the Republicans will ratify, most of them with and perhaps some of them without reservation! But there will be no hope less recalcitrancy, no abysmal asininity! No doubt Hays deserves some credit for that. And Root some also.

Hays's success in welding the broken fragments of his party into unity and fighting strength has been remarkable, and the secret of it is that neither faction has doubted his utter sincerity. To the liberals Hays seems a liberal. The best the Old Guard had to offer after the revolution of 1912 was 66 a light in the window for thee, brother," a pat on the shoulder, and kind words pending the election returns; at least no harsh words. But the Old Guardsmen never

Assimilation, and not elimination, is the policy of the Republican party, and there are no yesterdays in Republican politics. We have work to do for the good of the country, and it takes us all to do it. And I insist that all who are engaged in this work are entitled to the same consideration-the man who has not always voted with us and the man who has always voted with us because he may not have had any reason for doing otherwise.'

To the conservative Hays seems a conservative. And I think he has both qualities-liberal and conservative-living and working in him side by side. He is eager to step forward, but not too fast. A favorite quotation of his is a statement which former President Benjamin Harrison, of Indiana, once made in a lawsuit that was being tried in Hays's home town of Sullivan: "The length of the step is not so important as the direction in which it is taken." But when you put him to the test, in the inner chamber with party

associates, in determining plans or ex pressions of party policy, Hays's only question is, "Is it right?" If after fu discussion the answer is, "Yes," then momentary expediency never troubles Hays. He has never hesitated to take advanced ground if the position squared with what was determined to be right. He has been outspoken in word and indefatigable in deed for the effective prosecution of the war. And now that the war is over he is as eager for his party not only to look forward, but to step forward. He is no reactionary. He does not intend to wait for the torch of the Bolshevik to illumine darkly for him the pathway of human progress. He is sound about the safeguarding of produc tion and the wise protection of property right and of men of initiative and management in America; but he has declared also for broader social legislation, for the welfare of labor and the representation of labor in the councils of the Nation.

All men seem to look alike to Hays. From the beginning of his career he has been able to approach greatness with the same ease with which he is able to approach the less highly circumstanced. In a conversation with a friend of the Republican National Chairman, Hays's father once said that he himself had been handicapped in his career by an abashment that at times was embarrassing. "I early determined, if possible,' said the elder Mr. Hays, so to train my boys that they would not be handicapped in this respect, as I have been." Hays's friends are of the opinion that his father, in his case at least, succeeded admirably. And without sacrificing genuine modesty either.

66

Hays is a graduate of Wabash College, a Mason, a Knight of Pythias, an Elk, and a Presbyterian. He is still under forty, with a working quality and an enthusiasm that are contagious and boundless, although where physically these qualities have such deep rootage no man knoweth. In his native State they say that it is not recorded that he has made a speech since entering public life without using somewhere in his discourse these words: "Things do not happen, they are brought about." He first attracted attention in Indiana when he acquired the reputation of being the only man in the State who could dictate to; two stenographers and talk over two telephones at the same time. His achievements to date indicate that he holds the belief that nothing is impossible; that energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, and resourcefulness are capable of moving mountains.

He has the unique and enviable and difficult distinction of being able to be at once thoroughly loyal both to a political party and to his country. He is another illustration of the profound truth that human nature is the core of politics; that true courtesy and a practical sense of right are political assets of great importance; and, above all, that even in politics it is gentleness which maketh great.

ge

WHY SIBERIA WAS AN EASY VICTIM
TO THE BOLSHEVIKI

HERE may be some who cannot

THE
understand how, when the majority of
Russian people in Siberia did not desire
Bolshevism, it was possible for the Red
Guard to take the country without any
notable resistance. They will also marvel
that the Lenine forces were also swept

back with almost as much ease, while the
body of the people did not participate in
the struggle one way or another. It is just
as inexplicable to understand why large
numbers of our people took no fighting
interest in our Revolutionary War against
England and at all times a certain group
traded both with the enemy and the
American forces. When we ask why it

is that the Russians in Siberia did not to a man rise up and form a voluntary army, we must remember that when the colonies had nearly three million population the largest army General Washington was ever able to muster was less than twenty thousand men.

The Siberian position is perhaps easier to explain. The country was sparsely settled, and fully eighty per cent of its settlers consisted of an unlettered farming population. There were large numbers of poorly paid, unskilled workmen in towns and cities, and thousands of homeless soldiers doing nothing at all. German, Austrian, and Magyar war prisoners were numerous, poorly guarded, mixing with the people, imbibing and imbuing radical doctrines, ready to join any insurrectionary movement that would tear down their ancient enemy Russia.

With the principal towns and cities t along the railway, we can see how easy it was for the Red Guard to bring in arms, beb machine guns, and munitions and take possession of them, thus dominating the country.

12

A large percentage of the working

classes in the cities rallied to the cause of

the extremists and a certain percentage of political and criminal prisoners formed nuclei within the country. We also know that many Russian Jews, long persecuted by the Russian upper classes, joined in the movement either from personal motives of revenge or in pursuit of fanatical theories for reconstructing Russia in harmony with Semitic dreams. Among them were a number of returned Jews who had lived in America and become impregnated with I. W. W. philosophy. Then, lastly, we must admit into the explanation the peculiar Russian temperament-a temperament partly racial, partly the result of environmental conditions.

1 See Mr. Holman's first article on Siberia in The Outlook for August 6.-THE EDITORS.

BY CHARLES W. HOLMAN

Nine-tenths of the Russian people were just up from virtual slavery; they had been freed in the same year that the

Negroes of America were liberated. But liberation did not mean that they received new characters, or that the upper classes changed their attitude toward them, or that democracy would spring forth fullthey were no longer attached to the soil fledged among them. It did mean that to be sold as chattels with it; but they were still attached to the soil by virtue of their occupation. They still received directions from overhead, and they still had the police among them to suppress free speech, to prevent their forming popular organizations, and to keep them intellectually submerged. The Russians in

Siberia reflected some of this, naturally; for peoples do not change all their attitudes when they emigrate. But they possessed it in lesser degree than their brethren of European Russia.

Repression from above had its effect on the Russian character. We must also consider the climatic effects of too much darkness for wholesome thinking, too much cold for fresh-air types of living, too lithouse living, conversation, solitude, and tle recreation for the body, too much of brooding, and too little opportunity for action. The environment produced in the intelligentsia" an intensely subjective type of mind capable of high imaginative flights but with a paralyzed will. In the lower classes it produced merely indifference and much drinking of vodka.

66

Then the Revolution of 1917 threw the Czar's dominions into a popular Government. We all know what happened in Russia; but few know what happened in Siberia. The same wind that blew the

Imperial Government away swept over Siberia to produce principally uneasiness and fear. With but few exceptions, every glad beyond expression; and everybody, Russian in the Asiatic domain was glad finding himself now free to talk, did nothing else but that for a while. Nobody knew what to do, and very few people did for a time interpreted this freedom as an anything. The peasants and the workmen

invitation not to work.

All recognized the right of the Kerensky Government to rule; for somebody had to rule, according to the way the Russian had been brought up to view life. Then matters adjusted themselves somewhat, and Siberia went forward in a most promising way, taking advantage of Kerensky co-operative law, to strengthen certain opportunities, like that given in the local institutions. Then the turn of time threw the Provisional Government into the discard and raised Lenine and Trotsky on high.

The first reaction of the common people in Siberia, as nearly as I could get it, was to regard Lenine and Trotsky as twin Moses who could strike the rock of society and produce drink, or wave their staffs and manna would grow. Of course such things don't happen; but tall promises had been extended, and there were all their hearts. many who believed in the promises with

Ardent ones joined the Bolsheviki, indifferent ones went out and tilled their

fields, and the comfortable ones barred

their doors and buried their valuables. Only a few bucked up to resist; they were principally officers who had served their country against the Germans and felt that their lives were worth giving in an effort to save their country from the acts of ignorance.

The Bolsheviki pressed in and took Siberia in a very short time. While in power the heralded acts of violence and the usual acts of pathetic ignorance took place. How much can be attributed to the Bolsheviki and how much to the hoodlums who joined them will probably never be known. This much is certain, that, before they undertook to operate the machinery of wealth production they had seized, the Bolshevist leaders considered it necessary as the first step in their programme to "divide up" all the wealth in sight and live upon it as long as the dividing was good. They looted the state treasury, conscripted deposits, requisitioned stocks, from merchants, demanded provisions of peasants, and placed their own leaders in all the salaried offices of the Government.

As one reviews the drama enacted in Siberia, it becomes apparent that the Revolution did not affect that country as it did Russia, for the institutions subject to change were not at all similar. The acts described were about the worst, aside from certain acts of extreme personal violence and the depredations of footpads, due to the letting loose of criminals from jails and the release of restraint surrounding a certain type that always hovers on the borderland of criminality.

They turned over to the workers the few productive industrial plants, but could not turn over to the peasants the land, because the peasants already had their land for life, and in Siberia the peasants consider that lifetime occupancy without having to pay for it is much better than ownership. Bolshevism over there meant simply this: that the Red Guard took possession of the offices and the good things of life; terrorized the other classes into submission; kept them in submission by refusing the right of

franchise; and repeated their acts until commercial ruin fell upon the country and the wheels of industry stopped.

During this epoch the Bolsheviki in Siberia did not pay much attention to the rights of the Bolsheviki in Russia. They did not hesitate to rob the railways of shipments bound for Moscow. They refused to let persons passing out of Siberia, where there was a surplus of food, carry enough food with them to sustain them on their journeys into Russia. They armed the war prisoners who would join their colors, employed Chinese mercenaries to keep their forces strong, and were making themselves thoroughly obnoxious when the Czechoslovak army and the assisting White Guard Russian forces swept down from Vladivostok, fell upon them, and cleared them out of the cities and towns. In every city there were additions to the White Guards, and great rejoic ing that the liberators brought with them the news that the people could once more form and conduct their own local governments.

READJUSTMENT FOLLOWING BOLSHEVISM

In most of the recaptured cities the Czechs left small garrisons to serve as a moral stimulus to the people. But the people themselves needed very little stimulus to get busy and try to readjust them. selves and their institutions to a new period of living in which good government and work were to be their ideals. How small a force to maintain order was needed may be seen in the case of Krasnoyarsk, which I visited in October and November of 1918. This city of about sixty-three thousand inhabitants is located in what was thought to be a danger spot of Bolshevism. Yet a garrison of twelve Czechoslovaks, approximately fifty English soldiers, and a Russian garrison of less than three hundred Cossacks were sufficient to maintain order. The city was going full blast as to motion pictures, although almost every store was shut because there was nothing to sell. The stores that opened closed early, and about the only business being done was by little sausage shops, drug stores, and the municipal and co-operative stores. Tailors, however, were more than three weeks behind in their orders-remaking old clothes in most cases.

The municipal government had undertaken to bring in foodstuffs and was experiencing great difficulty on account of the irregular deliveries of the railway and the handicaps brought about by the currency situation. The ruble had declined to one-fifth its former purchasing power and nobody knew whether the old money would ever be worth anything, because about seventy billion rubles of Siberian paper money had been put into circulation in European Russia. Prices of commodities had risen to painful heights, and such commodities as could be had were few indeed. I paid $1.70 per pound for

1 Prices in general rose 700 to 1,000 per cent on the par value of the ruble; but the ruble fell to one-fifth its pre-war value. Metallic money had long since disappeared from circulation.

sugar and $2 per pound for tea in that city. Bread grains had risen from 12 cents per pood (36 pounds) to 97.5 cents plus freight and other charges at wholesale. Rubber overshoes sold for $12 per pair new and $3.50 per pair second hand. Sleigh and carriage drivers asked from 50 cents to $1.50 for short-distance drives, but in Omsk they were asking as high as $2 to take one a two-mile drive, while $2 to take one a two-mile drive, while meals in hotels averaged from $2 to $3 if one felt satisfactorily fed. Such prices represented an unprecedented advance in the cost of living in a country where food had always been cheap.

The peasants had long since gotten over their love of " dividing up" on the Bolshevist plan, or on any plan, for that matter, and were refusing to sell freely of their stocks which were in abundance in that particular province. They preferred to make a moonshine type of vodka which would bring to them six or seven times the price that their wheat or rye would net when sold for foodstuffs. They had, it was said, more paper money than they knew what to do with, and would no longer part with grain unless they were assured at least a part payment in kind. The peasants desired more agricultural implements, stoves, wagons, harness, machinery of many types, woolen materials, shot and powder for hunting. None of these things could the people in Krasnoyarsk give to them for local supplies. So the municipality was forced to send into Altai Province, where peasants were more willing to sell from their larger

stores.

Such troubles the Russians met with a stoicism and a certain degree of optimism. In the same way they viewed their dilapidated railway, their wrecked bank accounts, and many another predicament of which the stranger would not hear. They set about rebuilding with strong hearts that won the sympathy and admiration of those who were sent among them to study or to help in their work of reconstruction.

HOW KOLCHAK BECAME DICTATOR

Matters made progress during the summer and fall. Meantime various factions were claiming leadership and governmental authority. For a time there was much confusion of authority and jealousy of cliques. The country was too big and too unacquainted with itself to hold a popular election; the situation was too critical to trust to a ballot when eighty per cent of the people could not have read and would not have known how to mark one. But it was not too big for them to select delegates to represent them. And then there was a certain tacit acceptance of various persons known to be public-spirited and men of capacityjust as in America certain public men have always been molders of public opinion even to the time of their death. So, with a speed that was notable and a reversal of policies that was humorous, just as the early efforts of the factions in the State of Oklahoma had in them elements of humor, governments arose and gov

ernments fell; leaders arose and leaders were rejected.

Finally the situation sifted down to two rival factions in the west. One faction, calling itself the All Siberian Government, consisted of a committee of five. Annexed to that committee was a more or less representative parliamentary body called the Siberian Duma. This Duma, or Parliament, met at Tomsk and passed many resolutions, and its members drew some salary. Also in Omsk there was a group calling themselves the All Russian Government. The latter group did some finefingered work and succeeded in getting the All Siberian Government to cede over its rights and powers. It also persuaded the Duma to go out of existence. It then called Admiral Kolchak to the job of "Governor-in-Chief of Russia and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy."

KOLCHAK'S INTERESTING CAREER

At this moment Admiral Aleksei Vasilietch Kolchak is the central figure around whom the Siberians build their hopes of establishing a stable government. He is forty-seven years of age, a man of great personal magnetism, a brilliant talker, and a convincing orator. After the Russo-Japanese War Kolchak, with the rank of a captain, built himself into a prominent position in the public eye by work accomplished at the headquar ters of the Naval Ministry. His bravery and excellent use of his head in outwitting the Germans both in Baltic and Black Sea operations earned for him a name in naval history. He has traveled extensively and knows the United States and its institutions very well. He is said to be a great admirer of American methods; certainly his policy in connection with the railway has shown him to be a man capable of utilizing many agencies to achieve the re-establishment of a government in Russian territory.

KOLCHAK'S GOVERNMENTAL POLICY As will be seen by the title conferred upon its chief, the Kolchak Government of Omsk has been aspiring to solve the entire Russian problem. Perhaps it will be able to do so, but it seems hardly probable that the Admiral can gather, from among fifteen million people who are reluctant to respond to military ser vice but welcome all manner of peaceful trade development, an army of sufficient magnitude to wipe out Bolshevism in Russia, where there are one hundred and sixty million people under the shadow of Lenine.

It does seem reasonable that the Admiral may succeed in taking and holding all of the mineral territory in the Ural Mountains, and thus insure to the Siberian side the immense platinum and gold and precious stone wealth that those mountains contain. It does also seem probable that the Kolchak Government, by continuing its present policy of encouraging trade development and farm production, not touching the personal liberty question very strongly, will grow in strength, win the confidence of the

Allies, and succeed eventually in putting Siberia, at least temporarily, into the family of autonomous nations.

One of Kolchak's first acts was to abolish food regulations and Government monopolies of food. He has also authorized the re-establishment of the vodka industry by the Government as a means of reducing the waste now general in country districts from illicit distilling, and because it is thought that the sale of good vodka at reasonable prices to the people will cause them to buy it instead of buying from the peasants. This will automatically do away with illicit distilling except for home use.

The policy of the Kolchak Government is to encourage the re-establishment of all forms of private trade and to aid the development of the nation's resources. Its success in doing some of these things, particularly in securing aid from the French and English in military prepara tions and from the Americans in guard duty and railway operation, has promoted a general confidence in that Gov

AMERICAN OPERATION OF SIBERIAN RAILWAYS

Kolchak's Minister of Transportation, Mr. Ostrougoff, has served his country well in putting through Russian consent and approval for Allied operation of the railway. By the terms of the agreement, Minister Ostrougoff heads the commission which decides general policy matters; but the active management of the road has been given to John F. Stevens, a celebrated American railway engineer, who headed the American Railway Mission to Russia two years ago, and has remained in Manchuria and eastern Siberia since then as the director of a corps of American railway experts instructing the Russians of the Chinese Eastern Railroad.

Assisting Mr. Stevens is Colonel George H. Emerson, who until he went to the Orient was the active manager of the Great Northern Railway system. These experts will serve as the nucleus of a great organization that will be necessary in putting the Trans-Siberian line on a sound footing. They face no easy task; the rolling stock is in bad condition,

more than fifty per cent of the engines are disabled, and the roadbed needs considerable work done. Discipline also will vex them; for the spirit of the men has been killed somewhat by the inability of the Siberian Government to meet the payroll and the general disorder that has prevailed.

The present arrangement will give precedence, of course, to the movement of cedence, of course, to the movement of military supplies needed by the Omsk military supplies needed by the Omsk Government, but transportation facilities will improve very rapidly, and all look forward to a freer movement into the country of requirements and greater movement outward of raw materials. Mr. Stevens's first act preliminary to taking over the road was to send a train-load of needed foodstuffs into eastern Siberia for free distribution to the needy loyal workers on the line.

OUR BIG BROTHER POLICY IN SIBERIA

In other ways America has put into operation the Big Brother policy of operation the Big Brother policy of friendly assistance. We have set up in Vladivostok a Siberian branch of the War Trade Board. This Board was badly needed, both as a relief agency and as a stabilizer of trade between America and the Russians in Siberia. It has been gathering considerable information about the reliability of Siberian trading concerns, and it acts as a friendly agent between American and Russian trading interests. Lately deals in commodities involving over $20,000,000 have been consummated with Siberian co-operative societies and sanctioned by our Government officials.

The Red Cross has done a splendid work in connection with relief, and has extended its functions to include providing municipal governments with needed hospital supplies and medicines. Its head hospital supplies and medicines. Its head in Siberia, Dr. R. B. Jeusles, of Tokyo, is now in this country asking for greatly enlarged appropriations to expand the work being done in territory recaptured from the Bolsheviki. Agents of the Y. M. C. A. have carried out plans for relieving refugees, distributing money and goods among them. The Committee on Public Information has had representatives who distributed telegraphic news of the outside world to the Siberian papers and supplied lecturers and literature in Russian on American institutions.

Our consular officials, especially stationed or assigned to traveling positions there, have been in close touch with the local and general officials and many times have been approached for advice; their policy has always been one of refraining from interfering with internal matters, but of giving information whenever requested.

The United States Army is guarding the railway line to preserve the only avenue of relief. Our troops in Siberia are carrying out a policy of non-interference with internal questions; but their presence serves to give the Russians a feeling of confidence in the stability of civil life and encourages them to go

about building up a law-abiding commonwealth in the new country. In time all Allied assistance can be abandoned; but until then occupation is desired by the thinking Russians.

BUILDING FOR A GREATER FUTURE

During the war Siberian methods of doing business changed radically with the growth of municipal supply stores and the rapid development of the cooperative movement, whose stores sprang up as the stores of private merchants went out of business. Each city now operates several food stores, and almost. every village has its co-operative society. The co-operatives have availed themselves: of an opportunity and spread with great rapidity, forming into provincial federa tions which deal through central national organizations. In Siberia there are three great strings of co-operatives, each having a distinct field, but all overlaping some what with the others. The Union of Siberian Co-operative Unions is typically a consumers' organization. It has headquarters in Novonikolaievsk and claims. to be the central purchasing agency for 2,381,000 members and about 1,100,000. additional patrons. This organization is modeled after the co-operative societies. of England, and the Novonikolaievsk office is worked on a plan very similar to that by which the Co-operative Wholesale Society of Great Britain is conducted. It now buys in wholesale quantities for its membership and acts as. national sales agent for the sale of certain products.

Likewise the Association on Shares of the Siberian Co-operative Credit Societies, which also has headquarters in Novonikolaievsk, has built up a tremendous business in purchasing agricultural requirements for its membership and in furnishing short-time credit. The third member of the string is the Union of Siberian Creamery Artels, mentioned last week; the artels embrace a half million. farm families.

To combat the growth of the co-operatives, a number of trade associations have formed, and in some cases merchants plan to establish their own cooperative wholesales in order to get the benefit of large purchasing power.

Both private and co-operative organizations have got in touch with the American War Trade Board at Vladivostok and will welcome the establishment of business relations with American con

cerns.

There is something inspiring in the spectacle of a people joining hands to lift themselves from ruin and desolation into a newer, finer civilization. The fight to come back and come up brings out the essential qualities of manhood and womanhood in a people. It was so in the rebuilding of a new South from the ruins of the old South; it will be so in France and Belgium and in far-away Siberia, where the white torch of civilization is. burning bright.

Now their cities show ruin and stagnation and the people wear threadbare

garments. But their hearts are strong and their hopes high. They know that relief is soon to come. What does it matter to them if bread is high and sugar

scarce and tea hard to secure? Their forebears faced hardships and they also have known what it was to suffer worse things. Every day brings them news on

the brighter side, and their needs will soon be met.

So they are preparing for the battle with the future.

LTHOUGH Germany was a much more formidable foe than AustriaHungary, the task of making peace with the latter country is in some ways more difficult than arranging a settlement with Germany. The disruption of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire has meant the appearance of a number of heretofore inconspicuous national groups clamoring for independence or other privileges before the Peace Conference. Of all the Allied nations, none perhaps is more affected by this centrifugal movement from old Austria-Hungary than Rumania. Rumania comes before the Peace Conference not only on behalf of the inhabitants of Rumania, but also in the interests of the populations of Moldavia, ravished by Austria one hundred and fifty years ago, and renamed Bukowina; of the region along the Danube west of Rumania and north of Serbia, called the Banat; and of Transylvania and of the regions of Maramouresh and of Crishana. The Rumanian delegates are also speaking for Bessarabia, taken from Rumania by Russia in 1878.

Of all these newly found children Rumania is perhaps most interested in the Transylvanians, by virtue of her close racial and historical connection with them. It was not surprising, therefore, when I went the other day to the headquarters of the Rumanian Peace Delegation at 77 Avenue des Champs Elysées, Paris, to find the Minister from Transylvania, M. Vaïda, by the side of the Chief of the

Rumanian Mission and Premier of Rumania, M. Bratiano, who had given me an appointment for an interview. Madame Bratiano was there, and also M. Nicolas Misu, Rumanian Minister to London and at present a member of the Rumanian Peace Delegation. M. Bratiano is a big dark man with the polished air of a man whose life has been spent in diplomatic circles. Both Madame Bratiano and M. Vaïda are above medium size. Neither of them are notably large, however, and M. Misu is a bit smaller than M. Vaïda. Yet the whole four exhaled an atmosphere of bigness. Bigness and self-reliance. Polished bigness and polished selfreliance. They had in a noteworthy degree the healthy, vigorous alertness commonly found in people who have lived much out of doors, combined with the

restraint and polish which come from long familiarity with the salons of society. "If these are typical Rumanians, I want to go to Rumania," I said to myself.

"I want you to talk with M. Vaïda,' said M. Bratiano, when we had all sat down. "He speaks for Transylvania. You know we feel about our union with Transylvania in the way you Americans must have felt when Texas joined your Union after her war with Mexico."

"We Transylvanians," M. Vaïda began, "are a very old people. Our racial stock is identical with that of the Rumanians. In the fifteen hundred Hungarian administrative divisions of Transylvania, properly so called, and in the seven Hungarian comitats, which are properly included with it, there are altogether, even by the Hungarian statistics, 2,505,958 Rumanians, or 54 per cent of the whole, and 1,092,719 Magyars, or 232 per cent of the whole. But there is no doubt that these statistics underestimate the relative strength of the Rumanian element. The right figures are: for Rumanians, 2,990,000, or 622 per cent, and for the Hungarians 700,000, or 15 per cent, if we do not count the Szeklers, who are of Magyar origin and who live in the southeast angle of Transylvania. They number about 450,000, but are completely surrounded by Rumanians, on whom the Szeklers are completely dependent.

"So the dominating element in Transylvania has remained genuinely Rumanian in spite of all invasions of Magyars, Germans, and minor tribes. These Ruma nian Transylvanians have never abandoned the struggle for national liberty. At the beginning of the recent war many thousands of them refused to fight under the Austro-Hungarian flag and fled to Rumania, where they formed Transylvanian regiments in the Rumanian army. As soon as the Austro-Hungarian Government collapsed deputations of Rumanians from all the comitats of Transylvania and the Banat, a gathering altogether of more than a hundred thousand persons, came together in a National Assembly on the first day of last December and demanded the union of all the Rumanians of Transylvania and other parts of Hungary with Rumania.

"I have come to Paris to plead for

these people, these countrymen of mine, before the leaders of the great Allied Powers. What we want is local autonomy and union with Rumania."

When M. Vaïda had ceased speaking, M. Bratiano said:

"I hope you appreciate the significance of what my colleague has just said about the Banat. Rumanians were the first settlers in that country, where they have lived for many centuries. They are there to-day to the number of 600,000. The Germans there, who are mere colonists who arrived in the eighteenth century or later, number only 400,000, and there are about 300,000 Serbs who emigrated there in the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. It has been suggested that the Banat could be divided so as to unite the eastern part with Rumania and to give the western part to Serbia. But this could not be done. The Banat is not a mere geographical expression. It cannot be cut up like a beefsteak. The mountainous eastern part, which the Serbians are will. ing to let us have, and the flat western part, which they claim for themselves, are dependent on each other. The plain feeds the mountaineers and gives them a refuge in winter. On the other hand, the mountains supply the people of the plains with timber and minerals. By rivers and canals through the plain go the products of the eastern mountains to the Theiss and the Danube. The division of the Banat would leave the Rumanians with the upper part of the rivers only, while depriving them of free access to the Danube and the Theiss.

66

'But, above all, it is unwise to cut up the Banat because of the way in which the different racial elements are closely mixed. To divide the Banat would only be to make new irredentisms. The natural line of frontier is the Danube. If you would ignore the mark which nature has drawn, would you not be opening the way for an unending controversy over boundaries?

"Serbia and Rumania are old friends. There is no reason for one of them to fear the other, particularly now that we are all living in the common League of Nations. But, at any rate-if Serbia should still dread Rumanian proximity by our occupation of the Banat-let it be remembered that in our Treaty of 1916