here from Roumania I have to
talk German to him, as I would otherwise have to converse with my hands
and feet." The French mining officials, by the way, at Bor testified
that they had never heard of any tension between men of Serbian and
those of Roumanian origin; the Roumanians, who prefer agricultural work,
are more attracted to the mines in winter, when over 40 per cent. of the
1500 employes are Roumanians.

Dr. Athanasius and his friends are agitated, as one would imagine, when
they discuss with you the numbers of their countrymen. In _Le Temps_ of
April 22, 1919, they declared that they could produce 500,000, for they
realized that their previous claim of between 250,000 and 350,000 was
not large enough to give the Roumanians in Serbia the benefit of the
principle of nationality. But even this more modest figure will be
found, on examination, to be exaggerated. In the four north-eastern
counties of Serbia there were 159,510 Roumanians in 1895; 120,628 in
1900, and in 1910 a little over 90,000. This diminution, say the
chauvinists, is due to a falsifying of statistics, for those, they say,
who have attended a Serbian school are inscribed as Serbs. The truth is
that everyone is entered according to his mother-tongue. And history
knows countless instances of a gradual decrease in the case of people
placed in foreign surroundings and exposed to foreign influences. Like
the Illyrians who people Dalmatia, the Thracians of ancient Dacia and
the Serbs who emigrated to Russia in the seventeenth century, the
Roumanians of Serbia are undergoing this process and are inevitably
becoming Serbicized. Frequently we noticed that men possessing no
Serbian blood did not care to admit their Roumanian origin, which,
however, is no secret to their neighbours in spite of the Serbian
termination "i['c]" that, in the course of years, has been affixed to
their names. An allusion to their origin is clearly regarded as lacking
in delicacy. "Well, my ancestors were Roumanian," is often as much as
they will admit. And when some enterprising agitators came over from
Roumania to the department of Po[vz]arevac in 1919, the Roumanians of
those parts gave up to the authorities all those who did not manage to
escape. For ten years Lieut.-Colonel Gjorge Markovi['c] commanded the
9th Regiment, which is chiefly formed of Roumanians from that region.
They used to tell him that they wanted to have nothing to do with the
Roumanian boyars. "Here we are boy