THE list of the Slavic nations of the Balkans has come to an end. But there exists one other Balkan state which none of us, however, is likely to forget, as it has a habit of crashing into the front pages of our newspapers with a frequency that is at times a bit painful.That is not the fault of the Roumanian peasants.They are born and till their fields and die very much as peasants are in the habit of doing all the world over.It is due to the incurable vulgarity and the unspeakable bad taste of that Anglo-German dynasty which thirty years ago succeeded the highly respectable Prince Charles of Hohenzollern on the throne of a kingdom founded by the grace of God, Prince Bismarck and a certain Benjamin Disraeli.

It was in the year 1878 that these two gentlemen came together in Berlin and after paying their duties to the Deity decided to elevate Walachia(the land of the Wlachs)to the rank of an independent principality. If the present reigning family can ever be persuaded to remove itself to Paris, where people do not care how much dirty laundry is washed, as long as it is done with French soap, Roumania may go far, for Nature has been extraordinarily kind to this great plain between the Carpathians, the Transylvanian Alps and the Black Sea.Not only could it be turned into a granary as rich as that of the Russian Ukraine, of which it is the natural continuation, but the richest oil deposits of Europe are to be found near the city of Ploesci, where the Transylvanian Mountains join the plains of Walachia.

Unfortunately, the farms both of Walachia and Bessarabia between the Danube and the Prut are in the bands of large landowners, most of them are absentee landlords who spend their revenues in Bucharest, the Capital, or in Paris, but never among the people whose labor makes them rich.

As for the petroleum, the capital invested is usually owned abroad;and the same is true of the iron deposits of Siebenbergen or Transylvania, the enormous complex of mountains taken away from Hungary and given to Roumania in exchange for the more than highly doubtful services which the latter country had rendered the Allies during the Great War. But as Trarsylvania had originally been part of the old Roman province of Dacia, and had been made part of Hungary as late as the twelfth century, and as the Hungarians had treated the Roumanians of Transylvania very much as the treat the Roumanians of old RoumaniaHungarian minority of Transylvania today, we might just as well forget about it.These hopeless and intricate national puzzles can never be solved until every idea of nationalism shall have disappeared from the face of the earth.At the moment of going to press there seems to be little chance that such a miracle will happen.

According to the latest available statistics, the former Kingdom of Roumania counted 5,500,000 Roumanians and 500,000 Gypsies, Jews, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Armenians and Greeks. The new Roumania, the so-called Greater Roumania, has 17,000,000 inhabitants, of which 73%are Roumanians,11%Hungarians,4.8%Ukrainians,4.3%Germans and 3.3%Russians in Bessarabia and the Dubrudja, the land south of the delta of the Danube.As all these races dislike each other most cordially, do not in any way belong to the same ethnographical stock, but happen to have been thrown together by the artificial decisions of a peace conference, the material is there for a first-rate civil war, unless the foreign creditors intervene to save their investments.

Bismarck once said that the whole of the Balkans was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. One feels that in this, as in so many other things, the grouchy old founder of the last German Empire may have been right.