Powers.  Rumania, however, had already accomplished this by the decree enabling her Jews to acquire full citizenship by expressing the mere desire according to a simple formula.  This act confers the full rights of Rumanian citizens upon eight hundred thousand Jews.  The Jewish press of Bucharest had already given utterance to its entire satisfaction.  If, however, the Jews are now to be placed in a special category, differentiated and kept apart from their fellow-citizens by having autonomous institutions, by the maintenance of the German-Yiddish dialect, which keeps alive the Teuton anti-Rumanian spirit, and by being authorized to regard the Rumanian state as an inferior tribunal, from which an appeal always lies to a foreign body—­the government of the Great Powers—­this would be the most invidious of all distinctions, and calculated to render the assimilation of the German-Yiddish-speaking Jews to their Rumanian fellow-citizens a sheer impossibility.  The majority and the minority would then be systematically and definitely estranged from each other; and, seeing this, the elemental instincts of the masses might suddenly assume untoward forms, which the treaty, if ratified, would be unavailing to prevent.  But, however baneful for the population, foreign protection is incomparably worse for the state, because it tends to destroy the cement that holds the government and people together, and ultimately to bring about disintegration.  A classic example of this process of disruption is Russia’s well-meant protection of the persecuted Christians in Turkey.  In this case the motive was admirable, the necessity imperative, but the result was the dismemberment of Turkey and other changes, some of which one would like to forget.

The delegation of Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Poland upheld M. Bratiano’s contentions in brief, pithy speeches.  President Wilson’s lengthy rejoinder, delivered with more than ordinary sweetness, deprecated M. Bratiano’s comparison of the Allies’ proposed intervention with Russia’s protection of the Christians of Turkey, and represented the measure as emanating from the purest kindness.  He said that the Great Powers were now bestowing national existence or extensive territories upon the interested states, actually guaranteeing their frontiers, and therefore making themselves responsible for permanent tranquillity there.  But the treatment of the minorities, he added, unless fair and considerate, might produce the gravest troubles and even precipitate wars.  Therefore it behooved the Powers in the interests of all Europe, as of each of its individual members, to secure harmonious relations, and, at any rate, to remove all manifest obstacles to their establishment.  “We guarantee your frontiers and your territories.  That means that we will send over arms, ships, and men, in case of necessity.  Therefore we possess the right and recognize the duty to hinder the survival of a set of deplorable conditions which would render this intervention unavoidable.”