that their native
land has changed for the better. "If," said a Roumanian peasant before
an Agricultural Commission in 1848, "if the boyar could have laid hands
upon the sun, he would have seized it and sold God's light and warmth to
the peasant for money." Even in 1919 the peasant still had much reason
to be dissatisfied, for where the owner parted with his land it was
usually--no doubt as a stage in the transaction--made over to the
village as a whole. And if the boyar no longer has the monopoly of the
sale of alcohol, if he has so far improved that Vallachia is not now
losing its inhabitants as it was after the Regulations of 1831, when we
read that "in vain the rivers are assiduously watched, as if in a state
of siege; the emigrants cross at the places which are clear of troops.
Emigration is especially rife in winter, when the frozen Danube presents
an ever-open bridge," yet among the Roumanians of Serbia it has been
handed down from father to son what happened in the reign of Prince
Milo[vs]. To take one case out of many such that are preserved in the
National Archives at Belgrade, a dispatch was sent on February 11, 1831,
by Vule Gligorievi['c], his representative in those parts, to Prince
Milo[vs], who was at Kragujevac, enclosing a supplication from the
priests and other inhabitants of the large Roumanian island called
Veliko Ostrvo, in the middle of the Danube, praying that they might be
allowed to cross to Serbia. "We are in great misery," they wrote, "and
have boyars who are very bad, and we cannot bear the misery in which we
find ourselves, and in the greatest grief we beg your Highness to let us
come to Serbia with our wives and children." The Prince had a special
sympathy for Roumania and was therefore most reluctant to intervene in
her internal affairs. He adopted a very cautious attitude in this
matter, but when Gligorievi['c] sent him petition after petition he was
finally so touched by the recital of their woes that he permitted them
to cross the river; and one night, with the help of the Serbian
authorities, the whole island crossed over, to wit 57 families, with 186
oxen, 70 horses, 694 sheep and 87 pigs. Milo[vs] made them a free grant
of land for the building of a village, together with a vast stretch of
territory for pasture and stock-raising; at his own expense he built
them a church and extended to them all the liberties and advantages
enjoyed in Serbia by the Serbs themselves. As a token of thei