Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/75

 national economy. Considering first only his relation to the soil itself, he wants, in Roumania, more even than in Serbia (which is a country founded by democratic movements, those of Karageorge; in the Roumanian lands the Karageorge of the nation, Tudor Vladimirescu, was killed by the Greek revolutionaries of the Hetairie and could not therefore form a peasant State), capital, cattle, credit, solidarity. The elementary school does not teach him to till his land by new, and more profitable, methods. The landlord, employing machinery, holding his workers by the bonds established by money-advances, was able to benefit by the prospects of his enterprise, and provided his country with rich exports which not only maintained him personally in luxury but also financed a prospering State. The mediocre products of the small holders' toil today are not sufficient to maintain this trade and the ruin of the public finances was the logical result of this inability. For Roumania as for others, the organisation of the small property is the greatest of all problems. The creation of a class of freeholders in the country, too, is bound to bring forth new fashions in politics.

For the Balkan States this was an easier task than it is for Roumania, because of the fact that expropriation in their case was a consequence of the first acts following the establishment of a national state. It is to be observed that Greece has a relative majority of lower middle-class, especially prior to the recent increases of territory. In Serbia the peasants from the very beginning were the element which formed the State; the Scuptchina was a collection of villagers and, after the revolutionary Karageorge, Milosh, the founder of the Principality, remained to the last a brutal representative of the peasant class from which he had sprung. In Bulgaria, the peasantry plays a very great part in the political life.