de Laveleye,[45]
"it was proposed to entrust the supply of food to Christians. On the
first day the provisions came; on the second everything was late; on the
third day the whole army was dying of hunger. I was forced to make a
hasty appeal to the Jews. They have great qualities--they are
intelligent, energetic, economical; but these very qualities make them
dangerous to us on economic grounds." Roumanians acknowledge that the
agrarian policy of a few vast landowners and a submerged peasantry did
not admit of peasants being made more formidable by increased education,
and they doubt whether their country-folk, so fond of music and dancing
and drinking, have it in them to rival those Serbian non-commissioned
officers who, early in 1919, became millionaires by skilful operations
on the money market in the Banat. Yet the Serbs are as much addicted as
anyone to the aforementioned delights, and it is probable that the
Roumanian boyars do their own people an injustice. But while the people
were favoured at the expense of the immigrants--not always very
effectively: the Jews have been prohibited from owning land, yet a fifth
of the whole of Moldavia belongs indirectly to a single Jew--one would
suppose that some distinction might have been made between the more or
less pernicious alien who is apt to get the village into his toils and
that other Jew whose family has lived perhaps two hundred years in the
country, who feels himself a Roumanian but is legally a foreigner. One
Magder, a Jewish barrister, performed such exploits at the front during
the Great War that he was mentioned in the communique, a distinction
only conferred upon two other soldiers. For one and a half years the
official publications insisted on Roumanizing his name into Magdeu,
after which three Cabinet meetings occupied themselves with the subject
and finally announced that the error was not intentional but
typographical. A French officer wished the Roumanian Croix de Guerre to
be given to him, but Headquarters refused the request on the ground that
he was a Jew. One cannot blame the United States for taking the
initiative in compelling the Roumanians to modify their legislation,
since the clauses of the Treaty of Berlin were merely carried out to the
extent of naturalizing a maximum of fifty Jews a year, each case having
to undergo innumerable formalities, accompanied with payments to
deputies and others that rose to 30,000 francs. Many Jews volunteered
for