Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/89

 men of child-like and innocent visage, who hung upon his very words as if they were jewels of Holy Writ. It sufficed to make one understand why a throne had toppled to ruin, supported by such people. The reason they had lost power, wealth and all they possessed was because they had wanted to lose it.

And now let us compare the foregoing with a picture of socialist development in another country. Socialism and communism are really the same thing, the first being merely the theoretical, inanimate and bloodless image of the second.

In my youth socialism had already penetrated into Roumania. In its initial form it was introduced by students returned from Paris and Brussels. An aristocratic form of preaching, it rallied intellectuals to its flag, sons of the best families, men to whom the apparition of the socialist state actually in being (the days of the Commune were invoked lightly by such as had no experience of their horrors) would have been the most vivid moment of terror in their lives. Most of these meek propagandists were easily tamed in the bitter school of life. Suddenly in Moldavia, the neighbour province of Russia, a preacher of convinced and active character appeared, a Russian exile — perhaps a Jew, perhaps, as many surmised, an American — Doctor Russell. Established in Jassy, he won to his cause a few professors, the brothers Nădejde, both worthy disseminators of educational-science, and the wife of the elder of the brothers, a talented novelist. The review known as « The Contemporary », which was written in an exceedingly vulgar fashion and affected a negligent style of printing, was the creed of the young generation. Socialism in all its aspects, incredulity, negation, was