might at any moment arise, and said:  ’Only the presence of your Royal Highness keeps them [the Russians] at a respectful distance.’  It was but natural under these circumstances that the conduct of foreign affairs should have devolved almost exclusively on the prince.  The ascendancy which his high personal character, his political and diplomatic skill, his military capacity procured for him over the Rumanian statesmen made this situation a lasting one; indeed it became almost a tradition.  Rumania’s foreign policy since 1866 may be said, therefore, to have been King Carol’s policy.  Whether one agrees with it or not, no one can deny with any sincerity that it was inspired by the interests of the country, as the monarch saw them.  Rebuking Bismarck’s unfair attitude towards Rumania in a question concerning German investors, Prince Carol writes to his father in 1875:  ’I have to put Rumania’s interests above those of Germany.  My path is plainly mapped out, and I must follow It unflinchingly, whatever the weather.’

Prince Carol was a thorough German, and as such naturally favoured the expansion of German influence among his new subjects.  But if he desired Rumania to follow in the wake of German foreign policy, it was because of his unshaken faith in the future of his native country, because he considered that Rumania had nothing to fear from Germany, whilst it was all in the interest of that country to see Rumania strong and firmly established.  At the same time, acting on the advice of Bismarck, he did not fail to work toward a better understanding with Russia, ’who might become as well a reliable friend as a dangerous enemy to the Rumanian state’.  The sympathy shown him by Napoleon III was not always shared by the French statesmen,[1] and the unfriendly attitude of the French ambassador in Constantinople caused Prince Carol to remark that ’M. de Moustier is considered a better Turk than the Grand Turk himself’.  Under the circumstances a possible alliance between France and Russia, giving the latter a free hand in the Near East, would have proved a grave danger to Rumania; ’it was, consequently, a skilful, if imperious act, to enter voluntarily, and without detriment to the existing friendly relations with France, within the Russian sphere of influence, and not to wait till compelled to do so.’

[Footnote 1:  See Revue des Deux Mondes, June 15, 1866, article by Eugene Forcade.]

The campaigns of 1866 and 1870 having finally established Prussia’s supremacy in the German world, Bismarck modified his attitude towards Austria.  In an interview with the Austrian Foreign Secretary, Count Beust (Gastein, October 1871), he broached for the first time the question of an alliance and, touching upon the eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, ’obligingly remarked that one could not conceive of a great power not making of its faculty for expansion a vital question’.[2] Quite in keeping with that change were the counsels henceforth tendered to