Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/77

 has long since faded. What was true radicalism in the party of Pashitch; what was true liberalism in the organisation of Ristitch; what formed the ideology of the Bulgarian parties, beginning with the days when the right wing of Tsankov was opposed to the left of Karavelov? In Roumania, ruled by King Carol, by noblemen and their associated parvenus and intellectuals all bound together by relations of kinship and by the same social life in a restricted place, the Liberals of the Bratianus, who had forgotten their revolutionary creed, their republican and socialist ideology of 1848, were no more Red than the former « Whites » of the degenerate boyards, than the adepts of the German doctrines favoured by Carp and Maiorescu, than the so-called democrats, because they were born in the lower classes of the cities, under Take Ionescu. Here, as in the neighbouring countries, the true parties, bound to a real doctrine or to a solid class-interest, did not exist at the moment when the agrarian reform was decreed. But, as the Liberals initiated the great agitation on the agrarian question and were thus constrained to find a solution to it, so the schoolmasters and priests, in the villages identified their ambitions with the remnants of the Conservatives, to whom expropriation was a death-blow, and to some ambitious intellectuals to form a peasant party. This party, strongly sustained by the electors because of the visions its name conjured up before them, arrived to rule Roumania from 1928 to 1931. But it was obliged to fuse with the « nationals » of Transylvania to do so, a party whose origin and utility is sprung from the struggle against the Hungarian masters of yore and a party without social distinctions, then with the « nationals » of the former Austrian Bukovina, and with such Bessarabians as had, by means of their own, effected the agrarian revolution of that province. No more than the degenerate Liberals,