proof of a great faculty of adaptability and progress.  We can become the most important second-class power in Europe the day after the war stops; in fifty years, when our population will have passed twenty-five millions, a great power.  We shall be a nation content with our lot, and for that reason a factor for peace.  A greater Rumania responds not only to our ideas but to the interests of Europe.  The Magyars have had every chance, and they have lost.  It is now our turn.

This is a characteristic editorial paragraph from La Roumanie, which is the voice of Mr. Take Ionesco, who, more than anybody else, is the voice of those who want war.  Once in the government, but at the moment out of it, Mr. Ionesco keeps up a continuous bombardment of editorials and speeches, and with his-vigor, verve, and facility reminds one a bit, though a younger man, of Clemenceau and his L’Homme Enchaine.  Rich, well-informed, daring, and clever, with a really fascinating gift of expression, he will talk to you in French, English (his wife is English), Rumanian—­I don’t know how many other languages—­about anything you wish, always with the air of one who knows.  We have no such adventurous statesmen, or statesmen-adventurers, at home—­men who have all the wires of European diplomacy at their finger ends; look at people, including their own, in the aggregate, without any worry over the “folks at home”; know what they want much better than they do, and to get it for them are quite ready to send a few hundred thousand to their death.

Mr. Ionesco writes a long, double-leaded editorial every day, and very often he prints with it the speech, or speeches, he made the night before.  In a time like this, he says, those of his way of thinking can’t say too much; they must be “like the French Academicians, who never stop writing.”  Now and then, in the intervals of fanning the sparks of war, he takes his readers behind the scenes of European politics, of which he knows about as much, perhaps, as any one.

I arrived in Paris the 31st of December, 1912, in the evening.  M. Poincare received me the 1st of January, at half past eight o’clock in the morning—­an absurd hour in Paris.  But I had to go to London in the afternoon, and M. Poincare to the Elysee at ten o’clock for the felicitations of the New Year.  I asked M. Poincare for the support of France in our difficulties with Bulgaria.  M. Poincare said...  I said... and later events proved that I was right.

He is always sure of himself, like this—­no doubts, no half-truths, everything clear and irresistible.  I went to see Mr. Ionesco one evening in Bucarest—­a porte-cochere opening into a big stone city house, an anteroom with a political secretary and several lieutenants, and presently a quiet, richly furnished library, and Mr. Ionesco himself, a polished gentleman of continental type, full of animation and sophisticated charm, bowing from behind a heavy library table.