Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/129

 15th century, however, only Orthodoxy remained, a single style for the churches of both principalities.

In the 18th century, under the influence of western philosophy similar forms of administration occur. In the 19th, prompted by the general awakening of consciousness to nationality, we find the same national soul. At the beginning of yet another century the race was strengthened by the addition of such parts of the national territory as, during long centuries, had been occupied by the Hungarian kings in Transylvania or more recently filched by the Austrians in the Bukovina and the Russians in Bessarabia.

In this moment, too, a great part of the Roumanian race is not subject to the free realm, but lives under four regimes of foreign domination, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian. In the realm of United Roumania we have today one million and a half Hungarians and Szekler, many thousand Germans, Transylvanian Saxons, Swabians in the Banat, German colonists in the Bukovina and in Bessarabia, more than a million German and Magyarspeaking Jews, and a goodly number of Great and Little Russians. But in a century or two a greater synthesis will certainly be achieved with nearly all these elements under the rule of the same state and under the influence of a strong national vitality.

All these changes can, and shall, be explained. It is my purpose to find reasons for these tendencies towards the necessary unity, and for every new difficulty encountered.

To sum up: the reason for this historical phenomen is the association to work and the moral sense of brotherhood in such a work, which is enlightened by higher ideals.

There is a generally accepted fable that the Romance grouping on the banks of the Danube is the outcome of the conquest of Trajan, that in the new provinces, wrested from