Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/156

 is invariably saluted by the peasant or his woman, but this is no servile gesture towards a master, it is rather the outward manifestation of welcome and, in an untutored people, an exquisite courtesy. In the South-East of Europe, and perhaps in other countries as well, there is no nobler gentleman than the rustic, for whom the present-day, despite all its constitutional legislation, has been ungrateful and a cruel deception. In the neighbouring « county » of Maramureș—cradle of Moldavian dynasties and of its most ancient nobility—the peasant, on whom the strong drink peddled by the Jews has had such dreadful effects, still considers himself a born knight and addresses his equals in the terms of the 14th century, used at the Courts of their relatives and ancestors, the Moldavian princes.

Thus there were two originally very different groupings. One was that of the free peasants in the districts of the judges, slowly uniting to form a state in the manner of the Swiss federation, or the clan kingdom of Scotland—a mediaeval popular « Romania », maintaining until the dawn of the stronger political organisation of today the expressive quality of Roumanian principality, of a « Domnia » (empire) over the entire Roumanian country. The second, in the beginning, was only sovereignty over the Moldavian valley, a collection of strongholds arrayed against the Turks and Tartars, a dependency of the defensive works in Transylvania, a march of the Hungarian kings, which, after being consolidated, asserted its rights successfully to independence. The aboriginal peasant was not a conquered subject, merely because he had offered himself as a collaborator in the arduous task of destroying the peril from the East.

A rivalry between the two states was unavoidable. It was a consequence of their principles, and endured