the ikon in the neighbouring monastery was made by
St. Luke and the Bulgar beyond the mountains by the Devil. On the other
side of you sits the returned emigrant, chattering irrepressibly in his
queer version of the 'American language', and showing you the newspapers
which are mailed to him every fortnight from the States. His clean linen
collar and his well-made American boots are conspicuous upon him, and he
will deprecate on your behalf and his own the discomfort and squalor of
his native surroundings. His home-coming has been a disillusionment, but
it is a creative phenomenon; and if any one can set Greece upon a new path
it is he. He is transforming her material life by his American savings,
for they are accumulating into a capital widely distributed in native
hands, which will dispense the nation from pawning its richest mines and
vineyards to the European exploiter, and enable it to carry on their
development on its own account at this critical juncture when European
sources of capital are cut off for an indefinite period by the disaster of
the European War. The emigrant will give Greece all Trikoupis dreamed of,
but his greatest gift to his country will be his American point of view.
In the West he has learnt that men of every language and religion can live
in the same city and work at the same shops and sheds and mills and
switch-yards without desecrating each other's churches or even suppressing
each other's newspapers, not to speak of cutting each other's throats; and
when next he meets Albanian or Bulgar on Balkan ground, he may remember
that he has once dwelt with him in fraternity at Omaha or St. Louis or
Chicago. This is the gospel of Americanism, and unlike Hellenism, which
spread downwards from the patriarch's residence and the merchant's
counting-house, it is being preached in all the villages of the land by
the least prejudiced and most enterprising of their sons (for it is these
who answer America's call); and spreading upward from the peasant towards
the professor in the university and the politician in parliament.

Will this new leaven conquer, and cast out the stale leaven of Hellenism
before it sours the loaf? Common sense is mighty, but whether it shall
prevail in Greece and the Balkans and Europe lies on the knees of the
gods.

RUMANIA: HER HISTORY AND POLITICS

1

_Introduction_

The problem of the origin and formation of the Rumanian nation has always
provided matter for kee