Page:Wallachia and Moldavia - Correspondence of D. Bratiano whit Lord Dudley C. Stuart, M.P. on the Danubian Principalities.djvu/4

 press, their national representation, and the right to elect their princes,—in fact all their rights and all their liberties. Even the children of the people were denied the means of learning to read and write, by the suppression of the primary schools, which had previously existed in almost every village.

It would take too long to detail here the train of evils which accompanied and followed the invasion of the Principalities. You may readily form an idea from what has passed since 1848 in almost all the states of continental Europe. The wisdom and gentleness of governments are almost everywhere the same.

Russia, not content with having forced the Principalities to support, during two years, an army of invasion, consisting of nearly 100,000 men, now claims from them, as an indemnity, the exhorbitant sum of forty-two millions of Roumanian piastres (about £625,000), to which, as usual, the Porte has been compelled to agree.

That is not all. The inhabitants of the Principalities, still occupied in repairing the considerable losses occasioned by the last invasion, see themselves threatened with a new Russian invasion. It is to prevent this scourge, the mere threat of which has paralysed everything, suspended the execution of works, arrested commercial transactions, depreciated the value of goods, and, in a word, disturbed every interest; and, at the same time, to escape the overwhelming and unjust demand of 42,000,000 piastres, that they invoke the aid of the Government of Great Britain. They confidently count upon its aid; the more so, since they remember, with gratitude, that in difficult circumstances England has never failed to come to their assistance, and that her intervention has always been crowned with success.

The fear of invasion, which has taken hold of every mind in the Principalities, appears to be not without foundation; in fact, a Russian army, more numerous than that of 1848, consisting of three corps, and bringing with it formidable munitions of war, is daily advancing its posts towards the frontiers of Moldavia ; while the concentration of Austrian troops on the Turkish frontiers, is sufficient to justify the belief that war is imminent;