ENTER RUMANIA.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 225, 10 November 1916, Page 3 (Supplement)

ENTER RUMANIA.

A WELCOME ALLY—AND A STRONG ONE.

What are the events that have brought Rumania into the ring and with what objects does she enter it?

Ono event that lias undoubtedly made it easier for her to come to a decision was the death some eighteen months ago of King Charles, whose influence as a Hohenzollern Prince and the founder and architect of the modern Rumanian kingdom was on the side of a neutrality favourable to the Germanic Powers.

Another was Turkey's plunge into the war. followed by the dragging in of Bulgaria, and the inactions of those insensate adventures upon the Balkan situation. A third is Russia's re-occu-pation of the Bukovina and the prospect that she may before long be overrunning Transylvania, the very province on which Rumania's intuvsts and aspirations are centred. But the greatest reasons of all why Rumania has thrown in her lot with the Allies are that she is at last propared for war on a modern scale and now knows that she can defy both Germany and Austria-Hungary Very rarely in her history has Rumania miscalculated. There is no shrewder or more cautious or more aspiring State to he found in Europe. And her adhesion to the Grand Alliance now means that in the clear, keen judgment of her statesmen the Central Powers have done their worst and ai'3 going to defeat. Rumania was naturally and rightly neutral when she feared that her fate might be t-hia«t ot Serbia and Belgium. That she is now a belligerent and on the side of the Allies is a proof that that fear has passed.

No State carved out of the Ottoman Empire has more fully justified its liberation and autonomy. To her late King Rumania owes as much as anv ration has ever owed a sirgle man. Thinks, above all, to his inspiriting energy, the revenues of Rumania in the pas: tlixoe and a half derrdes have more than quadrupled, her population lias risen from five to seven f.nd a half millions, her Army has become a powerful and well-equipped force of over COJ,OOO men, her foreign commerce has expanded until it now amounts to more than £50,000,000 : year, her Budgets for the past ten vears have yielded unbroken surpluses, her National I>ebt of some £70,000,000, raised, bo it noted, without any special guarantees, has been mainly used on reproductive enterprises such as railways, foreots, oil-lieids, and salt mines, and her systematic policy of internal development has been reflected not only in the prosperity of her finances, but in the general confidence that she would neither make herself, nor allow others to use her as, an instrument of aggresicn. THREE BIG DIFFICULTIES. Not that Rumania has not some problems and difficulties of her own. She has three very big ones—a land question, a political, electoral, and Constitutional question, and a Jewish question, and they are stiii unsolved. But in the nationalisation and development of her railways and forests and her deposits of salt and oil—she is the only country that has kept the Standard Oil Company at bay—her national well-being has been carefully built up. And, beyond all tins, though from time to time at odds with both Greece and Bulgaria over the varying aspects of the old Macedonian question, the general influence and conduct ot Rumania over the wholo field of Balkan an 1 South-Eastern politics have been accordingly of a pacific and steadying character.

To develop such an internal strength as would enable her to maintain her hard-won freedom from Turkish rule, safeguard her strictly national rights and interests, and defend her neutrality—this, hitherto, has been the chief aim of her policy. One might imagine that something of the prudential opportunism as well as the valour of the fighters and rulers who under Trajan are said to have formed the Rumanian St ite survived in her people still. History has tested and purified them, and to-day they occupy politically, commercially, and geographically a position of peculiar strength. Roumania, indeed, lias never regained herself as a Balkan State, but rather as the most easterly of the Powers of Europe. As the principal granary or Central Europe, the master of the mouths of the Danube, and the sole and efficient policeman of its lower roaches, and lying across the route that links Europe with Asia Minor, her interests have taken a wider sweep than those of the small Kingdoms beyond her southern frontiers; and she has consistently sought to win the confidence and good will of the principal Ihiropoau States rather than to become engulfed in the agitations of Balkan politics. Her exceedingly calculating policy was well shown during the Balkan wars ot 1013. She remained neutral while Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia attacked ono another: and then, when Bulgaria was thoroughly exhausted, she presented a demand for a territorial compensation •and enforced it. It was a proceeding that Bismarck himself could hardly have bettered. RESCUE OF KINSMEN. Rumania's main internet in the prcnout struggle centres on her kinsfolk ju-t beyond her borders. Of these there are 1.000,000 in Bessarabia under Russian rule and 3,000,000 in Transylvania under the rule of the Hungarian Magyar", who are politic-all/, and especially in their dealings with their alien fellow-subjects, one of the most stupid and ruthless oligarchies that have ever tyrannised on the soil ■!' Europe. There is probably- the Magyars have a habit of "'cooking" the census returns in their own mt sts - one Rumanian in Hungary to every two and a half Magyars. Yet in the Hungarian Parliament there are onlv five Rumanian representilives to 401 Magyars. Legislation is a Magyar monopoly, and it is clearly the policy r.f the ruling race to keep the Rumanians in a state of intellectual degradation and so exclude them from the professions and the ranks of officialdom. To all Rumanians the rescue of their kinsmen from the clutches of the Magyars is a supremo ambition. Rumania stands to Translyvania in precisely the same relation as Italy to th. Trentino and Trieste: and. like Italy, sue has had the s-ns n and the courage and the nobility of snirit to face and accept the stern conditions of those stern tunes. Her intervention iu the v.ar means ?. gnat accession of strength to the Allied forces in a vit'd quarter, another push administered to the tottering rahric of the Dual Monarchy, a blow from which they cannot recover to Turkev and Bulgaria, and a loner stor> to the ultimate reunion of 13,000,000 Rumanians in a single State. S. R.