se figures; but roughly
speaking there are about one million Rumanians in Bessarabia, a quarter of
a million in Bucovina, three and a half millions in Hungary, while
something above half a million form scattered colonies in Bulgaria,
Serbia, and Macedonia. All these live in more or less close proximity to
the Rumanian frontiers.

That these Rumanian elements have maintained their nationality is due to
purely intrinsic causes. We have seen that the independence of Rumania in
her foreign relations had only recently been established, since when the
king, the factor most influential in foreign politics, had discouraged
nationalist tendencies, lest the country's internal development might be
compromised by friction with neighbouring states. The Government exerted
its influence against any active expression of the national feeling, and
the few 'nationalists' and the 'League for the cultural unity of all
Rumanians' had been, as a consequence, driven to seek a justification for
their existence in antisemitic agitation.

The above circumstances had little influence upon the situation in
Bucovina. This province forms an integral part of the Habsburg monarchy,
with which it was incorporated as early as 1775. The political situation
of the Rumanian principalities at the time, and the absence of a national
cultural movement, left the detached population exposed to Germanization,
and later to the Slav influence of the rapidly expanding Ruthene element.
That language and national characteristics have, nevertheless, not been
lost is due to the fact that the Rumanian population of Bucovina is
peasant almost to a man--a class little amenable to changes of
civilization.

This also applies largely to Bessarabia, which, first lost in 1812, was
incorporated with Rumania in 1856, and finally detached in 1878. The few
Rumanians belonging to the landed class were won over by the new masters.
But while the Rumanian population was denied any cultural and literary
activities of its own, the reactionary attitude of the Russian Government
towards education has enabled the Rumanian peasants to preserve their
customs and their language. At the same time their resultant ignorance has
kept them outside the sphere of intellectual influence of the mother
country.

The Rumanians who live in scattered colonies south of the Danube are the
descendants of those who took refuge in these regions during the ninth and
tenth centuries from the invasions of the