the return of Mrs. Powell's passport I
am not at all certain that I succeeded in entirely convincing the
_hotelier_ that she really was my wife.

Rumania is at present passing through a period of transition. Not only
have the area and population of the country been more than doubled, but
the war has changed all other conditions and the new forms of national
life are still unsettled. In the summer of 1918 even the most optimistic
Rumanians doubted if the nation would emerge from the war with more than
a fraction of its former territory, yet to-day, as a result of the
acquisition of Transylvania, Bessarabia and the eastern half of the
Banat, the country's population has risen from seven to fourteen
millions and its area from 50,000 to more than 100,000 square miles. The
new conditions have brought new laws. Of these the most revolutionary is
the law which forbids landowners to retain more than 1,000 acres of
their land, the government taking over and paying for the residue, which
is given to the peasants to cultivate. As a result of this policy,
there have been practically no strikes or labor troubles in Rumania,
for, now that most of their demands have been conceded, the Rumanian
peasants seem willing to seek their welfare in work instead of
Bolshevism. Heretofore the Jews, though liable to military service, have
not been permitted a voice in the government of their country, but, as a
result of recent legislation, they have now been granted full civil
rights, though whether they will be permitted to exercise them is
another question. The Jews, who number upwards of a quarter of a
million, have a strangle hold on the finances of the country and they
must not be permitted, the Rumanians insist, to get a similar grip on
the nation's politics. It is only very recently, indeed, that Rumanian
Jews have been granted passports, which meant that only those rich
enough to obtain papers by bribery could enter or leave the country. The
Rumanians with whom I discussed the question said quite frankly that the
legislation granting suffrage to the Jews would probably be observed
very much as the Constitutional Amendment granting suffrage to the
negroes is observed in our own South.

The truth of the matter is that Rumania is in the hands of a clique of
selfish and utterly unscrupulous politicians who have grown rich from
their systematic exploitation of the national resources. Every bank and
nearly every commercial enterprise of impor