In almost every language one could read words of encouragement to the recalcitrant Rumanians for having boldly burst the irksome bonds in which the peoples of the world were being pinioned.  “It is our view,” wrote one firm adherent of the Entente, “that having proved incapable of protecting the Rumanians in their hour of danger, our alliance cannot to-day challenge the safeguards which they have won for themselves."[170]

“If liberty had her old influence,” one read in another popular journal,[171] “the Great Powers would not be bringing pressure to bear on Rumania with the object of saving Hungary from richly deserved punishment.”  “Instead of nagging the Rumanians,” wrote an eminent French publicist, “they would do much better to keep the Turks in hand.  If the Turks in despair, in order to win American sympathies, proclaim themselves socialists, syndicalists, or laborists, will President Wilson permit them to renovate Armenia and other places after the manner of Jinghiz Khan?"[172]

But what may have weighed with the Supreme Council far more than the disapproval of publicists were its own impotence, the undignified figure it was cutting, and the injury that was being done to the future League of Nations by the impunity with which one of the lesser states could thus set at naught the decisions of its creators and treat them with almost the same disrespect which they themselves had displayed toward the Rumanian delegates in Paris.  They saw that once their energetic representations were ignored by the Bucharest government they were at the end of their means of influencing it.  To compel obedience by force was for the time being out of the question.  In these circumstances the only issue left them was to make a virtue of necessity and veer round to the Rumanian point of view as unobtrusively as might be, so as to tide over the transient crisis.  And that was the course which they finally struck out.

Matters soon came to the culminating point.  The members of the Allied Military Mission had received full powers to force the commanders of the troops of occupation to obey the decisions of the Conference, and when they were confronted with M. Diamandi, the ex-Minister to Petrograd, they issued their orders in the name of the Supreme Council.  “We take orders here only from our own government, which is in Bucharest,” was the answer they received.  The Rumanians have a proverb which runs:  “Even a donkey will not fall twice into the same quicksand,” and they may have quoted it to General Gorton when refusing to follow the Allies after their previous painful experience.  Then the mission telegraphed to Paris for further instructions.[173] In the meanwhile the Rumanian government had sent its answer to the three notes of the Council.  And its tenor was firm and unyielding.  Undeterred by menaces, M. Bratiano maintained that he had done the right thing in sending troops to Budapest, imposing terms on Hungary and re-establishing order.  As a matter of fact