red a powerful
speech[364] before the delegates assembled in plenary session on this
question of protecting ethnic and religious minorities. He covered
ground unsurveyed by the framers of the special treaties, and his
sincere tone lent weight to his arguments. Starting from the postulate
that the strength of latter-day states depends upon the widest
participation of all the elements of the population in the government of
the country, he admitted the peremptory necessity of abolishing
invidious distinctions between the various elements of the population
there, ethnic or religious. So far, he was at one with the spokesmen of
the Great Powers. Rumania, however, had already accomplished this by the
decree enabling her Jews to acquire full citizenship by expressing the
mere desire according to a simple formula. This act confers the full
rights of Rumanian citizens upon eight hundred thousand Jews. The Jewish
press of Bucharest had already given utterance to its entire
satisfaction. If, however, the Jews are now to be placed in a special
category, differentiated and kept apart from their fellow-citizens by
having autonomous institutions, by the maintenance of the German-Yiddish
dialect, which keeps alive the Teuton anti-Rumanian spirit, and by being
authorized to regard the Rumanian state as an inferior tribunal, from
which an appeal always lies to a foreign body--the government of the
Great Powers--this would be the most invidious of all distinctions, and
calculated to render the assimilation of the German-Yiddish-speaking
Jews to their Rumanian fellow-citizens a sheer impossibility. The
majority and the minority would then be systematically and definitely
estranged from each other; and, seeing this, the elemental instincts of
the masses might suddenly assume untoward forms, which the treaty, if
ratified, would be unavailing to prevent. But, however baneful for the
population, foreign protection is incomparably worse for the state,
because it tends to destroy the cement that holds the government and
people together, and ultimately to bring about disintegration. A classic
example of this process of disruption is Russia's well-meant protection
of the persecuted Christians in Turkey. 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.
Bratia