he had rendered a sterling service to all Europe, including France and Britain.  For if Kuhn and his confederates had contrived to overrun Rumania, the Great Powers would have been morally bound to hasten to the assistance of their defeated ally.  The press was permitted to announce that the Council of Five was preparing to accept the Rumanian position.  The members of the Allied Military Mission were informed that they were not empowered to give orders to the Rumanians, but only to consult and negotiate with them, whereby all their tact and consideration were earnestly solicited.

But the palliatives devised by the delegates were unavailing to heal the breach.  After a while the Council, having had no answer to its urgent notes, decided to send an ultimatum to Rumania, calling on her to restore the rolling-stock which she had seized and to evacuate the Hungarian capital.  The terms of this document were described as harsh.[174] Happily, before it was despatched the Council learned that the Rumanian government had never received the communications nor seventy others forwarded by wireless during the same period.  Once more it had taken a decision without acquainting itself of the facts.  Thereupon a special messenger[175] was sent to Bucharest with a note “couched in stern terms,” which, however, was “milder in tone” than the ultimatum.

To go back for a moment to the elusive question of motive, which was not without influence on Rumania’s conduct.  Were the action and inaction of the plenipotentiaries merely the result of a lack of cohesion among their ideas?  Or was it that they were thinking mainly of the fleeting interests of the moment and unwilling to precipitate their conceptions of the future in the form of a constructive policy?  The historian will do well to leave their motives to another tribunal and confine himself to facts, which even when carefully sifted are numerous and significant enough.

During the progress of the events just sketched there were launched certain interesting accounts of what was going on below the surface, which had such impartial and well-informed vouchers that the chronicler of the Conference cannot pass them over in silence.  If true, as they appear to be, they warrant the belief that two distinct elements lay at the root of the Secret Council’s dealings with Rumania.  One of them was their repugnance to her whole system of government, with its survivals of feudalism, anti-Semitism, and conservatism.  Associated with this was, people alleged, a wish to provoke a radical and, as they thought, beneficent change in the entire regime by getting rid of its chiefs.  This plan had been successfully tried against MM.  Orlando and Sonnino in Italy.  Their solicitude for this latter aim may have been whetted by a personal lack of sympathy for the Rumanian delegates, with whom the Anglo-Saxon chiefs hardly ever conversed.  It was no secret that the Rumanian Premier found it exceedingly difficult to obtain an audience of his colleague President Wilson, from whom he finally parted almost as much a stranger as when he first arrived in Paris.