The Stratford Evening Past WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1916. ROUMANIA.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 10, 6 December 1916, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Past WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 1916. ROUMANIA.

If neutral countries there can be today with any belief in the possibility of Germany acting other than as a brutal oppressor towards small nations, the lesson of what is happening in Roumania ought to be enough. For the time being ac any rate this hitherto happy and prosperous little nation is under the heel of the Teuton monster, and from whatever cause it may be, is suffering sorely. Hope of deliverance is not altogether lost because the Czar’s armies are straining every nerve to reach Roumania in time to save the capital and there is just a chance that Falkenhayn may be forced to call a halt. Roumania is lighting for her very life, and not for the first time in her troubled history. For several hundred years Roumania lias been the shuttlecock between rival monarchs of European great powers. The earlier inhabitants of the "country were Dacians. Pliny and Herodotus agree that they were the bravest and most honorable of the barbarian tribes which Rome encountered in her days of expansion. Thucydides praises them as wonderful fighters on horseback. When Rome withdrew, what is now Roumania became the scene of a series of racial struggles between the East and the West, first one army of marauders and then another liefiling the fertile plains and valleys until invasion of some sort or another seemed to be the normal lot of this unfortunate State. Though for years Roumania was in the hands of the Turks, the people have wonderfully preserved their racial entity, and increased and grown in strength and number until at this time Roumania. proper possesses a population of over seven millions, while yet another five millions arc located in Transylvania, Bessarabia, and elsewhere. H has always been the dream of the Roumanians to establish a Greater Roumania embracing all the peoples of Roumanian descent, and it was with that hope and promise they entered the war on the side of the Allies, and well knowing that success to the Huns must moan for themselves, as lor all other small independencies, ultimate extinction as a nation. It will be a lamentable fate if the Allies are unable to arrest the invasion, for Cjermau rage and venom' has centred on the hope oi ‘‘punishing" Konmania.