Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/90

 introduced into the higher schools. The Nădejde family were prosecuted and lost their posts as teachers. But the review continued to appear and found a staunch supporter in the person of a young landowner, Basile G. Morțun. He finally became a minister of the Liberal « bourgeoisie », while the elder of the Nădejde brothers, as a journalist, gave his pen to the same party. The second socialist movement failed because the workmen (Roumania then being in its very early industrial infancy) were both few and unprepared, and because the peasant, a hereditary individualist, notwithstanding that the soil had not yet become his property, had no taste for communism. When later, in 1907, a peasant revolution broke out in which thousands of them were killed, it was under the influence of this mystical creed that the students — who had rioted in the National Theatre just a year before against a French play — were called upon by the then Queen Elizabeth to avenge the oppression of the boyards.

A third epoch of socialism of obviously communistic leanings was provoked by that curious personality Doctor Rakovsky, who is now an exile in Siberia. This future ambassador of the Soviets in Paris, whose guests were to eat from the golden platters of his Czarist predecessors, was a Bulgarian by birth, though a Roumanian citizen owning land in the Dobrudja, a doctor and a captain in the Roumanian army. Bad orator though he was, he was idolised by the workers for his dissimilarity to any agitator they had so far encountered. Of great culture, speaking four languages, he wrote scientific articles on economics which were seldom read. When the war with his adopted country began, he was suspected and arrested. He was, however, set-free by a group of former comrades, and, somewhat unexpectedly, was heard