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THE HEART'S DESIRE OF RUMANIA

rid her confines of the last of these—the Magyars, who still hold her Transylvanian sons in subjection. The whole Transylvanian hill country, with rich valleys among the hills, was her old dominion, through which ran the mountain ridge, with the wide Danubian plain to the south and east. And, as it happens, Transylvania is the very heart of Rumania's traditional life, the fertile nursery even to-day of her best poets and historians.

Out of the blood-stained turmoil of fifteen centuries, in the throes of suffering and servitude, has come a Rumanian literature, the genuine work and possession of the nationof the people, by and for the people. It is her richest spiritual possession, and the written literature of the land has value just in proportion as it holds closely to the old oral literature of the centuries. The rhapsodists, of whom there are still a few among the aged men of the mountains and back-country regions, chanted these ancient poems, to the accompaniment of traditional music; and some among them knew more lines of the old verse than there are in Homer and Vergil taken together. And in these ancient poems is preserved the genuine spirit of Rumania, that living memory that makes the Rumanians a nation. If you wish to know why, and by what spirit inspired, the young Rumanians have once more crossed the mountain passes to attack the Magyars, you will find the truest answer in the old national songs.

There is the epic of Mihu Copilul, child of the mountains, who rides at midnight through dark, thick woods; the pine-shaded paths are lit only by the sparks his horse's iron hoofs strike out from the stones. About him the forest sleeps. But his horse starts back, scenting a hidden foe: Janus the Magyar, with his band of plunderers, is ambushed among the trees. Mihu sounds a challenge through the woods upon his flute, caressing the forest, rustling among the leaves. Janus the Magyar hears him and bids his brigands bring the player-if he be a warrior with flowers upon his cheeks, they shall not harm him; but if he be a woman's fool, they shall give him the palm of the hand and let him go. But Mihu smites the messengers hip and thigh, and comes riding on to Janus, sounding on his flute a wailing tune so beautiful that the mountains echo it and the falcons gather to hear it; the woods awaken, the leaves whisper, the stars stop twinkling to listen. In single combat Mihu slays the Magyar Janus, and drives his men back to the hoe;

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these barbarians are not worthy to draw the sword.

Not fifty years ago that which is now the Kingdom of Rumania was a Turkish province, and the long ages of subjection to the Turk have left their scars on Rumanian tradition. Here is an ancient story concerning a soldier whom the Turks dragged from his home, sending him to war against their Tartar enemies: An aged Ruman father dwells in his house in the midst of vineyards; to him, white-haired and white-bearded, his eyes full of dreams, a late-born son is given by Heaven; and the old man fondles him, pressing his forehead to the little closed fists. The child grows, loves, marries, and must forth to fight for the Sultan. Weep not now," he says; "in ten years, if I come not, you shall weep, for I shall be dead. Then, my father and mother, give my sweet widow again in marriage; she will be too young to live alone. And let her wedding feast be gay, without vain sorrowing, for I shall be asleep far away, pale, without a cross, my face turned to the sky."

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Stefan went forth to fight the Tartars. Ten years went, and he had not come back again. The aged father wept, but, remembering his son's wish, sought a new husband for his daughter-in-law, and the feast for the marriage went merrily. But the old man was full of grief, and, rising in the festival, he said: "It grieves my soul to see you drink the wine my son gathered in vintage. Ah, sorrow and sadness, departure with no return! This is the last cup of his wine that I shall drink until my death-that will not tarry long!" And, going down to the rich vineyard, he wrecked and tore and cut, breaking down the vines. Hoofs sounded on the road. A horseman, passing, asked him why he destroyed them. “White-bearded old man, art mad, thus to hack the clusters, the branchlets, and the roots, so that the vines shall bear no more?" The old man told the reason of his sorrow the going and the death of his son, and the second marriage of that son's wife. But the horseman said, "Give me hospitality, old man, for I am weary."

So the white-haired father came forth from his vineyard. Stefan, leaping from his horse, set the old man in the saddle, and thus they came to the house, where the chora (the dance) was whirling in the courtyard, noisy and full of joy, and the wine-cups were going round. Then they came to the table, and, as the custom is, the old man offered to each

guest the salt-platter, that he might lay on it a gift for the bride. When it was the stranger's turn, Stefan laid his wedding ring on the platter. His wife, examining the gifts, recognized it and him, and there was great rejoicing. Stefan once more took his place by the hearth, and for his return the festival was celebrated.

III

The Rumania of to-day is as large as England, with a population equal to that of England a century and a quarter ago. The present war seeks to add to it Rumanian lands and Rumanian peoples equal to Scotland, and, like Scotland, a region of pine-clad hills. But in many things it is to Ireland, rather than England, that comparisons point. We have seen that there is intense nationalism. There is also, as in Ireland, a land question, bitterly fought between two parties. Of cultivated land—as rich as any in the world, so that this small kingdom stands fifth among the nations for wheat and fifth for wine-Rumania has twenty million acres. Some ten million acres are divided into little peasant holdings of less than ten acres each; some ten millions into great estates averaging over two thousand acres, worked by laborers not far from serfdom, while the owners, absentees like the Irish landlords of the past, spend their money lavishly in Bucharest or Paris. So it comes that in no other country in Europe is the chasm so wide between the few very wealthy landowners-less than five thousand families-and the great bulk of the people who till the soil.

Yet another comparison with Ireland. The first ruler of modern Rumania, besides being a great nationalist, was the leader in a nation-wide land agitation which had for its aim just the aim Parnell had in view in Ireland-to turn a nation of laborers into a nation of peasant owners; and, like Parnell, the Ruman leader was ruined through a tragedy of passion, and left his work undone. So it comes that the land question is, after nationalism, the greatest and gravest question in Rumanian politics. For the present it is in abeyance; but it will assuredly come up again after the war.

This passion for the land and for the things that grow upon it has deeply colored Rumanian poetry. Just as among Irish popular ballads there is a class called “Come all ye's," from their first words, so, in Rumania, whole groups of poems begin with the names of plants or fruits: "Leaf of the violet! Leaf

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a love song that is representative of many: "Green leaf of the hawthorn! nothing any longer touches my thought.. Since longing came upon me, it has taken prisoner my heart; since longing seized me, my soul is on fire. I climb the hill, I go down into the valley, and my day is wasted by the roadside. I pass my life in longing. My little sweetheart, whose lips are like a flower, when I see thee, I forget the plow in the furrow, the pickax struck into the earth; I let my oxen graze, my plow rust, my pickax rot. Alas, little sweetheart! if thou wert willing, I would drive four plows and till the whole land! But thou art not willing, my woe, and I die of longing!"

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There is a note of fierce jealousy in this : Oh, tears! be poison for her whom I hate! May my eyelids close upon my eyes with the weight of tombstones !" And one finds also a plaint of pathetic sadness:

"I thought I saw the swallows of spring alight upon my house beams; they seemed to be my guests of olden days. Oh, blue sky of the first day when I opened my window to them! The swallows are the loves and longings of my young years; my passion soared on their wings, and my sighs sang in their complainings. But now the snow has come, the nest is empty! Why, alas! to-day, should I dream of spring?"

Equally simple, equally poignant, is the imagery of another lament: "When she departed, leaving me alone in the garden, in her footprint I sowed a flower. I watered it with my tears, and it grew and blossomed. But her hand plucked it not. The flower withered and I threw it on the roadway. Thus, of a surety, did she pluck my memory from her heart!"

In these folk poems one finds wonderful phrases: A wanderer went to the world's end, "where things that are mingle with things that are not ;" there is an old widow, "old as Time, and so poor that even the flies had deserted her hut" there are sheep that whiten the hillside like a carpet of opened flowers." And some of the songs end with a graceful touch of humor: " My hero is still living-unless he has died !" "The wedding feast is still going on, unless it ended-like' my song!"

One of the best of these poems is in praise of poetry itself, of the national Ru

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THE HEART'S DESIRE OF RUMANIA

manian poem, the," Doina:" "Oh, doina, doina, sweet song, when I hear thee I halt in the way. Oh, doina, doina, song full of fire, when thou echoest I stand still. Spring winds blow, and I sing the doina in the open air, amid the flowers and the nightingales. When winter comes, laden with tempests, I sing, in my cottage, the doina, to guard my days and nights. When the birth of the leaves in the forests comes again, I sing the doina of the brigands. The leaf falls to the earth, and then I sing the doina of lamentations. I speak the doina, I breathe the doina, I live only through the doina!"

One may sum up in the words of the late King Carol, who made himself a true Rumanian: " Our popular poetry in a marvelous way mirrors the painful times of a past full of fear and suffering. While science and politics lay dormant, poetry was profoundly alive in the Rumanian heart."

IV

If poetry be the soul of the Rumanian people, the tillage of the soil is its body. The wide plains of the Danube and its affluents- the Sereth, which flows south from Bukowina; the Yalomitsa, which rises in the Carpathian foothills; the Aluta, which comes southward through the mountains from Transylvania-are among the richest farm lands in the world; lands on which the fawn-colored oxen and buffaloes of bygone days are yielding to modern tractors and steam plows, just as, alas! the national costume of the peasants, splendid with colored needlework, is in danger of absorption into the drab monotony of "civilized" clothes. These rich lands the Rumanian peasants tilled as serfs, for masters who for centuries were little better than serfs of the Turks.

Rumania was for generations the battlefield of the Turks from the south, fighting against the Russians from the north; the Russians who, after long and abject helotry to the Moslem Tartars-of the hordes of the great Genghiz Khan—had slowly and through much suffering shaken off the Tartar yoke, at last driving their conquerors back to the shores of the Black Sea, on the fringe of the Sultan's Empire. Something over a century ago one of these interminable wars raged between Russian and Turk; and Suvaroff, the wild genius who led Empress Catherine's armies, inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Turks in a region largely peopled by Rumanians, at Ismailia, just north of the mouths

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of the Danube. The peace, made in 1812, gave Russia as spoils of victory the region between the Dniester and the Pruth, which bears the name of Bessarabia, from the old Rumanian princely family of Bessarab. There was hardly even a stirring of Rumanian nationality then; the name, even, of Rumanian had hardly come into being. The whole of the future Kingdom was still divided into two Turkish provinces: Moldavia, to the north, between the Pruth and the Carpathians; and Wallachia, to the south, between the Transylvanian Alps and the Danube. Their administration, which consisted largely in plundering their populations, was for the most part carried on by Greek traders from Stamboul, who bought their offices at auction from the Sultan, and counted on organized robbery to get back the price.

A word concerning the faith of the Rumanians. All eastern Europe, from the line of the Balkans northward, owes its Christianity to two Slav apostles, Cyril and Methodius, who, drawing their inspiration from the ancient Church of Constantinople, carried the Scriptures and Prayer-Book, in the old Slav tongue, to the northern half of the Balkan Peninsula and to what was to be the Russian Empire. So old Slavonic became the Church tongue of Servia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Russia, to whose living tongues it stands in the same relation as the Latin of the Western Church does to Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. It also became the ecclesiastical language of the Rumanian region, where it has always been an alien⚫ speech. So that in working toward national. consciousness and life Rumania had gradually to turn its Church tradition and services into the national tongue, as in the domain of law it threw off the shackles of the Phanariote Greeks, with the jargon they brought with them from Stamboul. For, while the best writing of modern Greece is close to the beautiful old tongue of Hellas-no living tongue has changed less in two millenniums -the daily speech of the peasants and the Constantinople traders is no better than a jargon. And this was still more true a century ago, when the fight for the Rumanian tongue began.

While they were thus winning a language for their nascent nation, which was coming up out of the throes of centuries of suffering and subjection, the Rumanians were at the same time reconquering, by slow and painful stages, the power and right to govern them

selves, though still under Turkish suzerainty. The people of Wallachia now elected their own prince, as did the Moldavians to the north. By a happy inspiration, they effected a union in 1859 by electing the same man to both offices, and Alexander John Cuza, whom we have likened to the great Irish Nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, became the first Prince of United Rumania, whose administration was completely unified in 1861. But five years later a strong party in Rumania brought about his downfall; in part because of elements in his private life, but more, perhaps, because of his land policy, which meant the emancipation and enrichment of the peasant millions at the expense of the few great landed families.

Then came the suggestion, made first, it is said, in France, that a prince of the old Roman Catholic line of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen should be called to govern Rumania; Prince Carol, of that ancient house, was unanimously accepted by a Constituent Assembly, which in the summer of 1866 formed also a Parliament of two houses, to govern constitutionally in union with the Prince. The Sultan of Turkey was still suzerain over Rumania; but Prince Carol, who was a trained soldier, throwing himself heart and soul into the national life of Rumania, organized and trained an excellent army, and began a network of strategic railways leading up to the mountain passes and down to the Danube, and later connected with the Black Sea by the line to Constanza, ⚫ which crosses the Danube by the magnificent bridge at Cherna Voda, the "black water." These were happy days for the Rumanians. Wealth and well-being increased; new writ ers, full of the spirit of Rumanian nationalism, multiplied poems and histories, dramas and romances, of Rumanian life; and Carol's consort, who had been Princess Elizabeth of Wied, became, as "Carmen Sylva," the enthusiastic prophetess of the Rumanian tongue and its ancient, beautiful traditions. The closeness of that tongue to French made easy a rich interchange between the two languages; Rumania's memories and aspirations were told in French, and the best French writers became the models of the young Rumanians.

V

In 1854, a dozen years before the coming of Prince Carol and "Carmen Sylva," and five years before the two Danubian principalities were first united, Russia and Turkey had

once more gone to war. Turkey, with the support of Napoleon III and Viscount Palmerston, was able, when the war closed, to get back a part of Bessarabia, which had then been a part of the Russian Empire for nearly half a century. In 1877, eleven years after Carol had come to rule Rumania, the Turkish persecution of the Slavonic Serbs and Bulgars led Russia once more to intervene in the Balkans. On May 17 a Russian army began a southward march through Rumania and across the Danube; and, after a first serious check at Plevna, Rumanian troops under Prince Carol were invited to join the Russians and fought splendidly through the remainder of the campaign. But the distri bution of the fruits of victory brought discord. Russia claimed and received western Bessarabia, which had been Russian territory from 1812 to 1856, but which had been embodied in Turkish Rumania from 1856 to 1877. As compensation Russia compelled Turkey to cede to Rumania the Dobrudja plateau, which turns the Danube northward at Silistria. But the compensation was felt to be inadequate ; the alienation of Bessarabia, with its million Ruman inhabitants, was one of the causes which led Rumania, six years after the war, to throw in her lot with the Central Empires.

Against the Central Powers, however, Rumania had a deeper and more lasting grievance. In the Bukowina, in Transylvania, and the Banat, there are four million Rumanians, and this whole region is saturated with the most ancient Ruman traditions. The city now called Karlsburg, in southwestern Transylvania, was Apulum, the headquarters of the legionaries of the Rumanian region; Sucheava, on a tributary of the Sereth, in Bukowina, the Beechland, was the ancient Moldavian capital and in the Putna monastery, hard by, the old Moldavian princes were buried.

It is curious, and far from creditable, that the, Rumanians of Transylvania and the Banat, subject to Hungary and governed from Budapest, have been far more harshly treated than their brothers in the Bukowina, directly under the Austrian crown. At the very time when the Magyars, under Louis Kossuth's fiery leadership, were fighting for their liberty and their national ideal these same Magyars were planning to disfranchise the Rumanians of Transylvania and reduce them to helotry. Transylvania was to be represented at Budapest by sixty-nine Deputies; but these were all to be Magyars or Germans,

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WHY I DO NOT WANT MY BOY TO BE A MINISTER

although the Rumanians were two-thirds of the whole population, while the Magyars were but a quarter and the Germans less than a tenth. This was in 1848, the "year of liberty." In 1863 the Emperor Franz Josef, bringing Transylvania more directly under his rule, dealt more generously with the Rumanian population; but three years later the Prussian victory at Sadowa broke the Austrian power. Hungary asserted herself, recovered Transylvania, and has been bullying and maltreating the Rumanians ever since, as she has bullied the Slovaks and other Slav peoples within the Kingdom. Under the Magyar election law, of more than four hundred representatives elected to the Diet, only one was a Rumanian. A tyrannous Magyarization went on at the same time, for there is a false nationalism as well as a true. And now

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the cup of injustice has flowed over; the armies from the Rumanian Kingdom lately poured through the Carpathian passes in an effort to liberate their western brothers, to reunite the old Rumanian land. And so rich, so fertile, so full of promise, is the Rumanian genius that the whole world stands to gain through a fuller expression of Rumanian nationalism. We have come to learn, through long centuries of pain and struggle, that the fruit of a nation's work is of sterling and universal value, of genuine worth in the world, only when that nation is living and breathing in the free spirit of its own genius; and this Ruman nation, young and strong and vigorous and of uncorrupted life, for all its centuries of tradition, has, we are confident, rich treasures in its heart, to be brought forth for the enrichment of the world.

WHY I DO NOT WANT MY BOY TO BE A

O

MINISTER'

BY A MINISTER

NE of our denominations closely allied to Plymouth Rock has just published an elaborate and well-conceived plan for the celebration within the denomination of the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims. Five planks are in the platform, and all are worthy of acceptation except the first half of number four: Large numbers of recruits for the ministry or other Christian callings." How much energy should be expended in getting large numbers" of recruits for the ministry at the present juncture?

I

Let me say, at the outset, that I am, and have been, a minister in good standing. have perhaps been fully as successful, as that word is ordinarily used, as the average minister. I have held positions of influence and have not been in want.

I came into the ministry naturally. I was dedicated to it at birth by a consecrated father. I have taken my life-work seriously and given myself to it unsparingly. When my own boy was born some years ago, emulating my father's example, my first prayer of thanksgiving also included a dedication of the wee youngster to my profession. On the whole. I now wish to take it back. I still dedicate my boy to Christian service.

I shall feel a

See an editorial in this issue.-THE EDITORS.

solemn exultation if he shall elect to serve in any capacity on the foreign field under a reputable board; I shall rejoice if he chooses some form of Young Men's Christian Association or social betterment work; I shall welcome his becoming a consecrated teacher or a self-sacrificing physician; if he enters a business calling with high ideals and purposes, I shall not deem it amiss-but I do not want him to be a minister. Why? I will be frank.

First, I do not want my boy to be intellectually fettered-in other words, I want him to have the scientific attitude and devotion towards truth. This he cannot have as a minister. He might perhaps have it as a minister at large or in a secretarial position, but not as the minister of a local church.

I wish my boy to have a broad and liberal education. In the process of this education he would survey the field of history and would see how ineffectual and puny are individual prejudices when arrayed against cosmic forces. He would dip into science, and his spirit would be exalted in the free quest of truth. He would start with certain hypotheses, but these would be beacons of light to illumine the way rather than fagots of fire to hem him in. Get at the ultimate, says science; if our hypotheses are established

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