clauses, formulated reservations.  These reservations were apparently acquiesced in by the members of the Supreme Council.  That, at any rate, was the impression of MM.  Bratiano and Misu.  But on the following day, catching a glimpse of the draft, they discovered that the obnoxious provisions had been left intact.  Then they lodged their reserves in writing, but to no purpose.  One of the obligations imposed on Rumania by the Powers was a promise to accept in advance any and every measure that the Supreme Council might frame for the protection of minorities in the country, and for further restricting the sovereignty of the state in matters connected with the transit of Allied goods.  And, lastly, the Rumanians complained that the action of the Supreme Council was creating a dangerous ferment in the Dobrudja, and even in Transylvania, where the Saxon minority, which had willingly accepted Rumanian sway, was beginning to agitate against it.  In Bessarabia the non-Rumanian elements of the population were fiercely opposing the Rumanians and invoking the support of the Peace Conference.  The cardinal fact which, in the judgment of the Rumanians, dominated the situation was the quasi ultimatum presented to them in the spring, when they were summoned unofficially and privately to grant industrial concessions to a pushing body of financiers, or else to abide by the consequences, one of which, they were told, would be the loss of America’s active assistance.  They had elected to incur the threatened penalty after having carefully weighed the advantages and disadvantages of laying the matter before President Wilson himself, and inquiring officially whether the action in question was—­as they felt sure it must be—­in contradiction with the President’s east European policy.  For it would be sad to think that abundant petroleum might have washed away many of the tribulations which the Rumanians had afterward to endure, and that loans accepted on onerous conditions would, as was hinted, have softened the hearts of those who had it in their power to render the existence of the nation sour or sweet.[144] “Look out,” exclaimed a Rumanian to me.  “You will see that we shall be spurned as Laodiceans, or worse, before the Conference is over.”  Rumania’s external situation was even more perilous than her domestic plight.  Situated between Russia and Hungary, she came more and more to resemble the iron between the hammer and the anvil.  A well-combined move of the two anarchist states might have pulverized her.  Alive to the danger, her spokesmen in Paris were anxious to guard against it, but the only hope they had at the moment was centered in the Great Powers, whose delegates at the Conference were discharging the functions which the League of Nations would be called on to fulfil whenever it became a real institution.  And their past experience of the Great Powers’ mode of action was not calculated to command their confidence.  It was the Great Powers which, for