leaving nothing to chance, they now put forth the most ingenious,
persistent and costly efforts to maintain the ground they had won.
Influential newspapers were bought or subsidized, new ones were
founded, public servants were corrupted, calumnies were launched
against the Allies and their supporters, and a nucleus of military men
ranged themselves among the opponents of intervention.

M. Bratiano suddenly turned wary and circumspect. His talk was now of
the necessity of time for preparations, of the divergence of views
between his Cabinet and that of the Tsar, and of the inadequacy of the
motives held out to his country for belligerency. Thereupon
negotiations began between Russia and Roumania, which dragged on
endlessly. What the Roumanian Premier said to the Russian Minister was
practically this: "The choice between belligerency and neutrality must
be determined by the balance of territorial advantages offered by
each. And the terms must be adequate and guaranteed." The conditions
which, according to him, answered to this description consisted of the
cession of all Transylvania, part of the Banat of Temesvar, the
Roumanian districts of Bukovina, and of the province of Crishana and
Marmaros.

About Transylvania there was no dissentient voice: it was admitted
that it ought by right to form part of the Roumanian kingdom. The
dispute between Bucharest and Petrograd hinged on a zone of the Banat
and a strip of Bukovina. The Tsar's Government admitted that Bukovina
might be annexed by Roumania as far as the river Seret, but not
farther north; whereas the Roumanian Premier insisted on obtaining the
promise of a zone the northern boundary of which would be formed by
the river Pruth, and would therefore include the important city of
Czernowitz, which is the capital of the province. The divergence of
opinion arising out of this demand for the district of Pancsova in the
Banat of Temesvar raised a formidable obstacle to an understanding,
for the claim runs counter to the principle of nationality somewhat
pedantically laid down by the Allied Powers. Parenthetically, it is
worth remembering that hard-and-fast principles which lead insensibly
to dogmatism cannot be too sedulously avoided by a Government.
Politics must assuredly have its ideals, but compromise is the method
by which alone it can approach them. The Allies have already been
constrained by tyrannous circumstance to entertain important
exceptions to their principle