Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/140

 of moral community for the race. The highest modern representative of Roumanian poesy, Mihail Eminescu, gives to his finest lines, full as they are of philosophical thought, a form which is understood by the meanest peasant in Roumania, so innate is the understanding of the sentiments pervading the work of the poet.

This is the most solid foundation of national life and, because of this, it imbued a peasant-army, at a time of arduous struggle for national identity, with invincible, if instinctive, solidarity.

The Roumanian synthesis which today plays its allotted part in forging into homogeneity the masses of diverse race and tongue in the present-day Roumania, which, despite these obstacles to progress, neverless possess a certain identity of aims and aspirations, has been the achievement of one class and one class only: the peasantry. They have infused their fundamental folklore with all that was brought by the alien or discovered by the cultured. All syntheses proceed from the truest representatives, from the most virile factors of a society. Thus has it been with Roumania and thus, may I say, will it be, notwithstanding all theories and traditions, all counsels or obstruction, in this great America.