Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/653

Rh as there are Magyars in the Hungarian kingdom, according to the census of 1890. Politically it thus happens that these people are pretty well split up in their allegiance. Nor can this condition be other than permanent. For the Carpathian Mountains, in their great circle about the Hungarian basin, cut directly through the middle of the nation as measured by language. This curious circumstance can be accounted for only on the supposition that the disorder in the direction of the Balkan Peninsula, incident upon the Turkish invasion, forced the growing nation to expand toward the northwest, even over the natural barrier interposed between Roumania proper and Hungary. Geographical law, more powerful than human will, ordains that this latter natural area of characterization—the great plain basin of Hungary—should be the seat of a single political unit. There is no resource but that the Roumanians should in Hungary accept the division from their fellows over the mountains as final for all political purposes.

The native name of these people is Vlach, Wallach, or Wallachian. Various origins for the name have been assigned. Lejean asserts that it designates a nomad shepherd, in distinction from a tiller of the soil or a dweller in towns. Picot voices the native view as to ethnic origins by deriving the word Wallach from the same root as Wales, Walloon, etc., applied by the Slavs and Germans to the Celtic peoples as "foreigners." This theory is now generally discountenanced. Obédénare's attempt to prove such a Celtic relationship has met with little favor, The western name Roumanian springs from a similarly exploded hypothesis concerning the Latin origin of these people. To be sure, Roumanian is distinctly allied to the other Romance languages in structure. It is an anomaly in the eastern Slavic half of Europe. The most plausible explanation for this phenomenon, and one long accepted, was that the modern Roumanians were descendants of the two hundred and forty thousand colonists whom the Emperor Trajan is said to have sent into the conquered province of Dacia. The earlier inhabitants of the territory were believed to have been the original Thracians. Since no two were agreed as to what the Thracians were like, this did not amount to much. Modern common sense has finally prevailed over attempts to display philological erudition in such matters. Freeman expresses this clearly. Roumania, as he says, lay directly in the pathway of all invasions from the East; the hold of the Romans upon Dacia was never firm; the province was the first to break away from the empire; and finally proof of a Latinization only at the late date of the