Page:Wallachia and Moldavia - Correspondence of D. Bratiano whit Lord Dudley C. Stuart, M.P. on the Danubian Principalities.djvu/28

29 vanguard of the Turkish army, with a hundred thousand combatants well skilled in the management of arms, and animated with all the ardour and strength which they will draw from the wish to defend the liberties and independence of their country, and from the glorious memories of their history; for if Europe is ignorant of it, yet the Roumanians all know, that no other people has deserved more from humanity, or defended with more of heroism than they, the cause of Christianity and civilisation. That it is they who initiated the Eastern nations into the civilisation of the West; that this part of Roumania (the Principalities) is the only country of the East of Europe which has never submitted to foreign domination; that even at the time when the Turks made all Europe tremble, and when their empire spread from Constantinople to Vienna, these treated with them, but were never subjugated; that the eagle which is seen on their monuments and on their banners is the same Roman eagle which led their march when they quitted Rome for the land of the East, and which has never left them for a single day during eighteen hundred years.

Allow me, my lord, in concluding, to express my hope that the favourable opportunity which you desire to meet with, to bring the question of the Principalities before the House of Commons, will not fail to present itself to you; the more so as it is, I think, of less importance to call the government to account for what it has perhaps not done, than to fix its attention, and that of the house, on the important place which the Principalities occupy in the question of the East.

D. BRATIANO.