Everything is in miniature, you see, in a little nation like this, which, although only as large as one of our smaller States, has a King and court, diplomats, and army, and foreign policy.  All in the family, so to speak, and the chanteuse will sing amusing verses about the prime minister as if she really knew what he was going to do, and, curiously enough—­for things are sometimes very much in the family, indeed, in these little capitals—­maybe she does know!

Of course the Calea Vittorei is not Rumania, though a good deal more so than Fifth Avenue is America; nor are the officers posing there those who would have much to do with directing the army if Rumania went to war.  Ten minutes away from the city limits and you might be riding through the richest farming country in Wisconsin or Illinois:  hour after hour of corn and wheat, orchards, hops, and vineyards, cultivated by peasants who, though most of them have no land and little education, at least look care-free, and dress themselves in exceedingly pleasing homespun linen, hand-embroidered clothes.  Then higher land, and hills as thick with the towers of oil-wells as western Pennsylvania, and, just before you cross into Hungary, the cool pines of the Carpathians and the villas of Sinaia, the summer home of the court, the diplomats, and the people one does not see very often, perhaps, in the afternoon parade.

It is a pleasant and a rich little country.  You can easily understand why its ruling class should love it, and, set apart from their Slav and Magyar neighbors by speech and temperament, want to gather all Rumanians under one flag and push that, too, into its place in the sun.

And this, of course, is Rumania’s time—­the time of all these little Balkan nations, which have been bullied and flattered in turn by the powers that need them now, and cut up and traded about like so much small change.

Rumania wants the province of Bessarabia on her eastern border, a strip of which Russia once took away; she wants the Austrian province of Bukowina and the Hungarian banat of Temesvar on the west, but most of all the pine forests and the people of Transylvania, just over the divide—­you cross it coming from Budapest—­largely Rumanian in speech and sympathy, though a province of Hungary.  As the Rumanians figure it out, they once stood astride the Carpathians—­“a cheval” ("on horseback"), as they say—­and so, they feel, they must and should stand now.

We are a nation of fourteen million souls—­six less than Hungary, but a homogeneous state, solidly based.  Our soil gives us minerals and fuel and almost suffices for our needs.  Our people are one of the most prolific in the world and certainly not the least intelligent.  We have behind us a continuity of national existence lacking in other nations in this quarter of the globe.  In our modern epoch we have assimilated French culture with indisputable success, and have given in every field