Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/78

 supported by their groups of banks and, in short, all manner of vested interests, can such a confederation be considered an organic formation with a solid future. It can be moulded, in Roumania as elsewhere, only after the bulk of the peasants shall have been educated to a greater capacity for forming their own judgement of political ideas and politicians beyond the empty phrases of the demagogues, the cheap and scurrilous press and, with the advent of universal suffrage, the electoral « symbols » for the illiterate.

There is also an economic aspect to the agrarian and political problems.

In the ancient Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman civilisations, the same system of trade routes existed — the imperial « vias » and « dromoi » — and stretched to all points of the peninsula. This system was joined with Pannonia and the Adriatic: the via pannonica and the via aegnatia. Often the presence of a road has promoted the creation of a state (not only of many cities) and, while the roads of the mediaeval states were linked up in an unitary system, the states had perforce to follow in their wake. The great eastern road between Scandinavia and Central Asia favoured the formation of a united Russian state and the counterpart of this road was the new artery joining Moscow to Mongolia. The necessity of sending the products of the western manufacturers in the Low Countries and of the metal workers of Germany to Eastern Europe and of bringing the products of Eastern arts and crafts to the west brought about the creation of the trade route which traversed Transylvania, crossed the mountains and gave to the Wallachian plains and the Moldavian valleys the task of guarding the caravans of eastern and western merchants alike.