Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/127

 our great mistress of error and delight, the Goddess Illusion.

I say all this as an apology for bringing before an American public the problems — already solved — of the Roumanian sythesis, at a time when the question of future sythesis preoccupies the minds of all thinkers in this immense country, which has become a new fatherland for human beings drawn from nearly all the races of the globe. This question was recently defined by a clever French sociologist, Monsieur Siegfried, as the new and arduous struggle between the old Puritanism of the first settlers combined with that of their later associates who were rapidly fused into the same religious and linguistic community, and the over-numerous newcomer, holding other points of view, othe variations of feeling and other habits of thought. Attack and defence, new and old America. To a virile and discriminating French mind this seems to be the truth, but, if other methods than that of reducing the infinite varieties of facts to a few broad lines be employed, it is not certainly the ultimate verity. Here, a new form of mankind is in course of development, a slow development because the components live under the domination of natural ties, of religious organisations and of theories to be found in books. I will try to show how a synthesis of nationality, language, popular customs and art developed in the course of a millenium on the banks of the Lower Danube and the slopes of the Carpathians without recourse to fighting against such obstacles, in what manner the Roumanian Nation, composed of nearly twenty million people, was slowly but surely moulded. The sense of the ancient Latin proverb «Ab uno disce omnes» can thus be changed as far as the broad lines of the achievement are concerned.

However, to come to my subject. 119