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In Italy, it has been said with truth, the conviction prevailed that Roumania would descend into the arena as soon as the Salandra Cabinet had declared war against Austria, and a good deal of disappointment was caused by M. Bratiano's failure to come up to this expectation. But the expectation was gratuitous and the disappointment imaginary.
President Wilson's lengthy rejoinder, delivered with more than ordinary sweetness, deprecated M. Bratiano's comparison of the Allies' proposed intervention with Russia's protection of the Christians of Turkey, and represented the measure as emanating from the purest kindness.
Well, if one were charged with the defence of this thesis, the last source to which one would turn for evidence in support of it is our diplomatic negotiations with M. Bratiano's Cabinet. In the light of this exposé the severe judgments that have been passed on the policy of the Roumanian Cabinet may have to be revised. The crux of the situation was the attitude of Bulgaria.
In this case the motive was admirable, the necessity imperative, but the result was the dismemberment of Turkey and other changes, some of which one would like to forget. The delegation of Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Poland upheld M. Bratiano's contentions in brief, pithy speeches.
M. Bratiano's appropriate attitude may be described as statuesque. Occasionally his Press organs commented upon the manifestations of the interventionists in words barbed with bitter sarcasm and utilitarian maxims. "Roumania's blood and money," the Independence Roumaine explained, "must be spent only in the furtherance of Roumania's interest."
This amazing line of action was decided on by the secret Council of Three without the assent or foreknowledge of the nation to whose interests it ran counter and the head of whose government was rubbing shoulders with the plenipotentiaries every day. But M. Bratiano's existence and that of his fellow-delegate was systematically ignored.
Clumsy though their professional diplomacy might be, their economico-diplomatic campaign had left little to be desired. Its fruits were ripe. They had firmly knitted the material interests of the little Latin State with their own, and could rely on the backing of nearly every supporter of Bratiano's Cabinet in the country.
From the outset M. Bratiano's position was unenviable, because he based his country's case on the claims of the secret treaty, and to Mr. Wilson every secret treaty which he could effectually veto was anathema. Between the two men, in lieu of a bond of union, there was only a strong force of mutual repulsion, which kept them permanently apart.
M. Bratiano's bid for the services of his eminent opponent was coupled with the offer of certain portfolios in the Cabinet to M. Jonescu and to a number of his parliamentary supporters. While negotiations were slowly proceeding by telegraph, M. Jonescu, who had already taken up his abode in Paris, was assiduously weaving his plans.
Roumania's experience in 1877, under M. Bratiano's father, when, after having helped Russia to defeat the Turks, she was deprived of Bessarabia and obliged to content herself with the Dobrudja, was the main motive for this striving after definite conditions, while her readiness to look upon that loss of Bessarabia as final moved her to demand every rood of Austro-Hungarian territory which was inhabited by her kinsmen or had belonged to them in bygone days.
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