THE ROUMANIAN.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 February 1916, Page 8

THE ROUMANIAN.

A MAN OP MIXED BLOOD. THE HARD LOT OF THE PEASANTS. (By John Reed and Boardman Robinson i in the Metropolitan). If y«u want to infuriate a Roumanian, you need only speak of his country as a Balkan State. "Balkans!" he cries. "Balkan! Roumania is not a Balkan State. How dare yen confuee us with half-savage Greeks or Slavs! We are Latins." , One is never allowed to forget that; the newspaper insist every day that Roumanians are Latins—every day there is a reference to "our brothers, the French, or the Spaniards, or the Italians"—but really of purer blood than those "brothers,"" for the Roumanians arc descendants of Roumanian veterans colonised in Transylvania by the Emperor Trajan. Some local writers complacently insist that Roumania is the inheritor of the Roman Empire; in a square in Bucharest there is a fountain showing Romulus and Remus suckled by the Wolf, and some of the public buildings are adorned with the Insignia—tlie Fasces, the Eagle and "S.P.Q.R." But those Roman colonists may have originally been drafted into the legions from Tarsus, or the suburbs of Jerusalem, or South Germany. Add to that the blood of the native Dacians, a strong ' Stavonie strain, Magyar. Vlaque and a great deal of gipsy, and you have the Roumanian. ... He speaks a Latin

language strongly impregnated with Slavic and Asiatic roots—an inflexible tongue to us, and harsh and unmusical to the ear, because of the word-endings in "sh," "ill" and "urilor." And lie has Latin traits; excitability, candour, wit, and a talent for hysterical argument in critical situations. He is lazy and %oud, like a Spaniard, but without a Spaniard's flavor; sceptical and libertine, like a Frenchman, but without a Frenchman's taste; melodramatic and cruel, like an Italian, without Italian charm. One good observer has called Roumanians "bad Frenchmen," and another "Italianised gipsies." Shopkeeper's and cabmen and waiters in restaurants are thieving and ungracious; if they can't cheat you they fly into an ugly rage and scream like angry monkeys. How many times have Roumanian friends said to me, "Don't go to So-and-so's shop; lie is a Roumanian, and will cheat you. Find a German or French place." I was cheated by a tailor, who raised his price after ho had repaired some clothes that I needed badly; he locked them in his safe and refused to deliver until I paid. "What would you?" shrugged everybody. "He is a Roumanian. . . ."

It will be said that I have judged Roumanians by the people of Bucharest, and that Bucharest is not all Roumania, But I insist that the metropolis reflects the dominant traits of any nation —that Paris is essentially French, Berlin essentially Prussian, and Bucharest thoroughly Roumanian. Sometimes there are peasants on the street: the men in white linen trousers and shirts that fall to their knees, embroidered in delicate designs of flowers, the women in richly decorated linen skirts and blouses of ('.rawn work exquisitely worked in. celer, chains of pold coins hanging ar«un dthcir necks. They

FIT INTO THE 'COMIC OPERA SCHEME OF THINGS.

Ent sue hour by automobile from Bucharest you coßie upon a village where the people live in burrows in the ground, covered with rsofs of dirt and straw. The ground their burrows are dug in is owned by a boyar—:i land-owning noble —who keeps a racing, stable in France; and they till his land for him. Two per cent, of the population can read and write. There is no school there. Several years ago the proprietor himself built a school for his people, on condition that the Government would take it over and i suppart it; for three years now it has been used as a storehouse.

These peasants eat nothing but corn —not because they are vegetarians, but because they are too poor to eat meat. And the church provides frequent fasts, which are the subject of laudatory comments on ''frugality and thrift'' by satisfied landowners. The peasants are very religious, or superstitious, whichever you want to call it. For instance, they believe that if a man dies without a lighted candle in his hand to guide him through the (lark corridors of Death, he will not reach heaven. Now many people do die suddenly without the lighted candle; and here is where the Church conies in. The country priest charges the dead man's family eighty francs to get him into heaven without a candle, and a certain sum yearly to keep him there. The priest also takes advantage of the Vampire legend—a superstition of Hungarian origin, widely helievcd in the Balkans and South Russia. If a peasant dies and others from his family or village follow him in quick succession, the priest suggests that the dead man's spirit is a vampire. To lay this murdering ghost, the body must be exhumed in the dead of night (for it is strictly forbidden by Roumanian criminal law) and the heart torn out by an ordained priest, who drives a wooden peg through it. For this he charged a hundred francs. Once I went north on a night train which carried the Crown Prince's private car. It was a cold night, with a wind that, ate into your bones. Yet all night long we looked from our windows upon a line of wretched peasants standing beside th? track, one every quarter of a mile, ragged and shivering, holding torches above their heads to do honor to their prince. Never was a country so ripe for revolution. More than 50 per cent.»of the arable land is owned by le?s than ten per cent, of the country's landowners —some four and a-half thousand big proprietors out of a population of seven and a-half millions, seven-eighths of whom are working peasants; and this in spite of the fact that the Government has been breaking up the big estates and selling land to the people since

18M. Tlie boyars and great landholders selddm live on 1 tlieir estates. Indeed, it is all they can do to keep up their hotels in Paris and Vienna, their houses in Bucharest, their villas at Nice, Constanlza and Sinaia, their winters on the Riviera art galleries, racing stables and general blowing of money in the seven quarters of the world. One family 1 met posed as great humanitarian* because they provided mud huts for their people and paid them. Add to this hopeless condition of affairs the fact that all voters in Roumania are divided into three classes on the basis of their incomes, so that one hundred peasant votes equal one rich man's vote. There have been several resolutions in Roumania, the last one purely agrarian, in 1907 — but since the conscript army system exists it was easy to order peasants in the south to shoot down their northern brothers, and ..vice versa. You have only to see the Roumanian peasants, gentle, submissive, with almost effeminate dress, manners—even their national songs and dances are pretty and soft —to realise how frightful the pressure that would force them into revolt.