The Roumain is a Communist pure and simple; the uneducated among them know no other political creed.  It is not that of the advanced school of Communism, which deals with social theories, but a simple consistent belief that, as they themselves express it, “what God makes grow belongs to one and all alike.”  In this spirit he helps himself to the fruit in his neighbour’s garden when too lazy to cultivate the ground for himself.

This child of nature is by instinct a nomadic shepherd and herdsman; he hates forests, and will ruthlessly burn down the finest trees to make a clearing for sheep-pastures.  It is impossible to travel twenty miles in the Southern Carpathians without encountering the terrible ravages committed by these people in the beautiful woods that adorn the sides of the mountains.

“The Wallacks find it too much trouble to fell the trees,” says Mr Boner.  “They destroy systematically:  one year the bark is stripped off, the wood dries, and the year after it is fired....  In 1862, near Toplitza, 23,000 joch of forest were burned by the peasantry.”

Judging from what I saw during my travels in Hungary in 1875-76, I should say the evil described by Mr Boner ten years before has in no way abated.  The Wallacks pursue their ruthless destruction of the forests, and the law seems powerless to arrest the mischief.  At present there is wood and enough, but the time will come when the country at large must suffer from this reckless waste.  There are about twenty-three million acres of forest in Hungary, including almost the only oak-woods left in Europe.  The great proportion of the forest-land belongs to the State, hence the supervision is less keen, and the depredations more readily winked at.  Riding one day with a Hungarian friend, I asked what would be the probable cost of a wooden house then building on the verge of the forest.  My friend replied, laughing, “That depends on whether the builder stole the wood himself, or only bought it of some one else who had stolen it; he might possibly have purchased the wood from the real owner, but that is not very probable.  So you see I really cannot tell you what the house will cost.”

Incendiary fires are very common in Hungary.  Here, again, the Wallacks do their share of mischief.  If they have a grudge against an active magistrate or a thriving neighbour, his farmstead is set on fire, not once, but many times probably.  Added to this, the Wallack takes an actual pleasure in wanton destruction.  As an instance, an English company who are working coal mines in the neighbourhood of Orsova have been obliged within the last two years to relay their railway from the mines to the Danube no less than three times, in consequence of the Wallacks persistently destroying the permanent way and stealing the rails.

Notwithstanding all this the Wallacks are not without their good points.  They become capital workmen under certain circumstances, and they possess an amount of natural intelligence which promises better things as the result of education.  “Barring his weakness for tobacco and spirits, the much-abused Wallack is a useful fellow to the sportsman and the traveller,” said a sporting friend of mine who visits Transylvania nearly every autumn.