Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/9



In September 1929 I was invited by a club of my fellow-countrymen at Indiana Harbour near Chicago, to attend an anniversary of their foundation. I accepted with the greater pleasure as it made it possible for me to visit nearly thirty similar Roumanian centres in the United States, where some 120.000 of my compatriots are employed, for the most part, in factories. The Roumanians living in Canada, however, are working in agriculture, or at least the greater part of them.

As a happy coincidence, too, it so chanced that about the same time Sir William Craigie, the celebrated compiler of the English dictionary published under his name, inspired me with the idea of delivering a series of lectures at various of the American universities. Arrangements had still to be made when I arrived in that country, but I was nevertheless warmly welcomed by my colleague, Mr. Duggan. There could however be no question of a regular course of lectures, but only of the occasional presentation of such subjects as were more or less connected with my better-known researches. In some cases the lectures were prepared beforehand, in others they could not be delivered, and in still others a change of topic was requested and arranged for. In all I spoke at universities, chambers of commerce and intellectual circles nearly twenty times.

Now, by combining one or more lectures into one chapter and by elaborating many points which could not then be