sia on the
north, and Bulgaria on the south, is the home of the Gacians,
descendants of the warlike tribes who for years held their own against
Greek and Roman. After the fall of Rome the province became a melting
pot, through which the hordes of invaders, passing from Russia to Asia,
were in a sense made one people. The Goths, the Huns, the Lombards, the
Bulgars and the Magyars traversed the region, leaving many settlers. It
became divided into two provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia, known as the
Danubian provinces.

Both provinces were conquered by the Turks in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, and under Peter the Great the Russians attempted
the conquest of the provinces. In 1859 the two provinces were united
under a prince whose independence both Turkey and Russia recognized, and
in 1881 the country declared itself a kingdom. The province of Wallachia
derives its name from the people who early settled there, the Wallachs.
The Roumanians claim descent from Vlachi, a colony of Romans, who
settled in Thrace, and, in the twelfth century, emigrated to the Danube.
The name Roumania is derived from the word Roman, the country having
originally been "the Land of the Roumani." Roumania has a population of
about 7,600,000 and comprises 64,000 square miles.

Macedonia, famous country of Greece in the time of Philip, father of
Alexander the Great, embraced the entire region from the Scardian
Mountains to Thessaly, and from the Epirus and Illyria to the river
Nestos, taking in what is now part of Salonica. It was reduced by the
Persians and subsequently Alexander the Great made it the nucleus of a
vast and powerful empire along with Greece. Ultimately it passed under
Roman sway, until it was ceded, in 1913, to Greece.

AN OBJECT OF CONTENTION.

Alsace-Lorraine is worthy of note, as comprising one of the territories
which for centuries have been the cause of conflict between Germany and
France. It is pointed to as the physical evidence of the humiliation of
France at the hands of the Germans, in 1870, and has for nearly one-half
a century been a German imperial territory. The surrender of Alsace and
part of Lorraine was made the principal condition of peace on the
settlement of the war of 1870. Bismarck, it is said, might have been
content with a language boundary, taking only that portion of the
country in which lived those who spoke the German tongue.

For strategic purposes, however, Alsace and Lorraine, with the ex