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The Rumanians, on the contrary, had been ordered to keep to the old conditions, although they, too, had lost their force. That is exactly what happened in the end. But the delegates would not believe it until it became an accomplished fact. About twenty-five thousand had already left France.
If this is not true, gentlemen, deny it. Otherwise one day you will surely have an explosion." Whether these grave innuendoes, together with the statement made by Mr. George Herron, the incident of the Banat Republic and the ultimatum respecting the oil-fields unofficially presented to the Rumanians suffice to establish a prima facie case may safely be left to the judgment of the public.
Without doubt skill and superior knowledge, as well as superior organization, were on the side of the invaders. By the middle of the month the Rumanians were being forced back, both in the Alt and the Jiul valleys, facts which could not be hidden by the dispatches from Bucharest announcing the capture of a machine gun at one point or a few dozen prisoners at another.
Not on account of the political despotism of the Magyars, for that of the Russians was in no way behind it. But whilst the Rumanians of Bessarabia were, with few exceptions, illiterate peasants, in Transylvania there was a solidly established and spirited middle class, whose protests kept pace with the oppressive measures.
As has already been stated, by the middle of the month the arrival of German reenforcements had checked the advance of the Rumanians, and now the situation along this front assumed an aspect not quite so encouraging to the Rumanians.
Here the Italians and Rumanians chimed in, reminding their kinsmen that it was the same American statesmen who in the peace conditions first presented to Count Brockdorff-Rantzau made over the German population of the Saar Valley to France at the end of fifteen years as the fair equivalent of a sum of money payable in gold, and that France at any rate had raised no objection to the barter nor to the principle at the root of it.
All through that externally quiet period a marked discrepancy existed and developed between that line of policy and the trend of public opinion. The interest of the Rumanians within the kingdom centred increasingly on their brethren in Transylvania, the solution of whose hard case inspired most of the popular national movements.
And, lastly, the Rumanians complained that the action of the Supreme Council was creating a dangerous ferment in the Dobrudja, and even in Transylvania, where the Saxon minority, which had willingly accepted Rumanian sway, was beginning to agitate against it.
Restitution of the provinces and territories taken in the past from the Allies by force and against the wish of the inhabitants. 5th. Liberation of Italians, Slavs, Rumanians and Czeko-Slovaks from foreign rule. 6th. Liberation of the peoples subjected to the tyranny of the Turks and expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, as being decidedly extraneous to western civilization. 7th.
From the Rumanians within the kingdom they have received little beside sympathy.
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