ROUMANIA. 



RUSKIN, JOHN. 



623 



other escaped and took refuge in Bucharest. Those 

 who remained, intimidated now, paid the black- 

 mail, amounting to 200,000 francs. The murderer 

 of Prof. Mihaileano was encouraged to do the 

 deed by the president of the Macedonian Com- 

 mittee, a retired officer of the Bulgarian army. 

 The distrust of Roumania and Bulgaria one for 

 the other began with the reassertion of Russian 

 influence in Bulgaria after the fall of Stambuloff 

 in 1894 and the gravitation of Roumania toward 

 Austria. The activity of the Bulgarian propa- 

 ganda in the Dobrudja caused the dismissal of 

 some Bulgarian schoolmasters, and impelled the 

 Roumanian Government to build a strategic bridge 

 over the Danube at Tchernavoda. 



When the Macedonian Committee first made de- 

 mands on the Roumanian citizens resident at Sofia 

 for contributions under penalty of assassination 

 the Roumanian agent at Sofia made representa- 

 tions to the Bulgarian Government without any 

 satisfactory result. A Roumanian notable named 

 Flava was shot and wounded on June 16, 1900, 

 by a revolutionary journalist, and this led the 

 Roumanian Minister of Foreign Affairs to address 

 a strong note to the Prime Minister at Sofia. The 

 Roumanians in Sofia decided to pay the contribu- 

 tion of 30,000 francs demanded at that time, upon 

 which the Roumanian minister sent another note 

 demanding the prosecution of the members of the 

 Macedonian Committee for blackmail. The mur- 

 der of a Bulgarian named Fitoffski in Bucharest 

 by a man, who was dispatched from Sofia for 

 the purpose, the murdered man having been sus- 

 pected of being a Turkish spy, had placed the 

 Roumanian Government in possession of docu- 

 mentary evidence against the heads of the Revo- 

 lutionary Committee in Sofia. The murderer con- 

 fessed that Trifanoff, the president of the Bu- 

 charest branch of the Macedonian Committee, had 

 pointed out the man to be struck down, and in 

 their search the police found letters of Sarafoff in 

 connection with the affair. The murder of Prof. 

 Michaileano, who was a Macedonian by birth, as 

 was also his murderer, occurred on July 22. The 

 confessions of Trifanoff and of Dimitroff furnished 

 additional evidence against the members of the 

 Central Committee, one of whom was an uncle of 

 Dimitroff. The Roumanian Government therefore 

 renewed its demand for the arrest and trial of the 

 directors of the committee Sarafoff-, Kovacheff, 

 and Davidoff all former Bulgarian officers, al- 

 though no reply had yet been received to the 

 previous communication. In reply to the remon- 

 strances of the Roumanian minister, the Bulgarian 

 Premier Ivanchoff declared that he could not take 

 action against accused persons until the evidence 

 on which to prosecute was in his hands. The 

 Roumanian Government supposed this to mean 

 that the Bulgarian Government would do nothing 

 until the Roumanian courts had established the 

 guilt of the accused, and became more urgent 

 in its demands. The dispatch of troops from both 

 sides to the frontier followed, but shortly they 

 were withdrawn when satisfactory explanations 

 were given. 



The deficit in the budget was found to be 

 43.000,000 lei. Arrears of taxes could not be col- 

 lected. Although the harvest was fair, it fell be- 

 low expectations, and nearly every branch of the 

 revenue declined. The Government proposed to 

 sell the cigarette paper monopoly to Berlin bank- 

 ers for 15,000,000 lei, petroleum rights in the west- 

 ern Carpathians for 10,000,000 lei, the Government 

 >liavos in the national bank for 13,000,000 lei, and 

 a part of the state forests for 5,000.000 lei. These 

 proposals were vigorously assailed by the Opposi- 

 tion. In the autumn a peasant uprising in oppo- 



sition to the new taxation occurred in the Ranniku 

 and Busoe districts, and in taking possession of 

 Pirkoff the troops killed one peasant and wounded 

 several after three officers and some of the soldiers 

 were wounded. The regular session of Parliament 

 was opened on Nov. 28. Economy was promised, 

 but without any reduction in the army. 



RUSKIN, JOHN, an English author, born in 

 London, Feb. 8, 1819; died in Coniston, England, 

 Jan. 20, 1900. He was the only son of a prosper- 

 ous wine merchant, from whom he inherited a 

 large fortune, and upon whose tombstone the son 

 was justified in writing, as he did, " An entirely 

 honest merchant." Of his father, Ruskin writes 

 in Prseterita, his autobiography: " My father was 

 a dark-eyed, brilliantly active, and sensitive youth. 

 He had learned Latin thoroughly, though with no 

 large range of reading, under the noble traditions 

 of Adams at the High School of Edinburgh ; while, 

 by the then living and universal influence of Sir 

 Walter Scott, every scene of his native city was 

 exalted in his imagination by the purest poetry 

 and the proudest history that ever hallowed or 

 haunted the streets and rocks of a brightly in- 

 habited capital." Of his mother he says: "1 do 

 not know for what reason, or under what condi- 

 tions, my mother went to live with my Scottish 

 grandfather and grandmother, first at Edinburgh, 

 and then at the house of Bower's Well, on the 

 slope of the hill of Kinnoul, above Perth; but 

 certainly the change for her was into a higher 

 sphere of society that of real, though sometimes 

 eccentric and frequently poor, gentlemen and gen- 

 tlewomen. She must then have been rapidly grow- 

 ing into a tall, handsome, and finely made girl, 

 with a beautiful, mild firmness of expression ; a 

 faultless and' accomplished housekeeper, and a nat- 

 ural, essential, unassailable, yet inoffensive prude. 

 I never heard a single word of any sentiment, 

 accident, admiration, or affection disturbing the 

 serene tenor of her Scottish stewardship; yet I 

 noticed that she never spoke without some slight 

 shyness before my father, nor without some pleas- 

 ure to other people, of Dr. Thomas Brown." He 

 says: "That the Professor of Moral Philosophy 

 was a frequent guest at my grandmother's tea 

 table, and fond of benignantly arguing with Miss 

 Margaret, is evidence enough of the position she 

 held in Edinburgh circles. The frank and cousinly 

 relation went on without a thought on either side 

 of closer ties until my father, at two or three and 

 twenty, after various apprenticeships in London, 

 was going finally to begin his career in his own 

 business. By that time he had made up his mind 

 that Margaret, though not in the least an ideal 

 heroine to him, was quite the best sort of person 

 he could have for a wife, the rather as they were 

 already so well used to each other; and in a quiet, 

 but resolute enough way, asked her if she were 

 of the same mind, and would wait until he had 

 an independence to offer her. His early tutress 

 consented with frankly confessed joy. On these 

 terms the engagement lasted nine years, at the end 

 of which time, my grandfather's debts having all 

 been paid and my father established in a business 

 gradually increasing, the now not very young 

 people were married in Perth one evening after 

 supper, the servants of the house having no sus- 

 picion of the event until John and Margaret drove 

 away together next morning to Edinburgh. In 

 looking back to my past thoughts and ways, 

 nothing astonishes me more than my want of 

 curiosity about all these matters; and that, often 

 and often as my mother used to tell with com- 

 placency the story of this carefully secret mar- 

 i iaire. I never asked, ' But, mother, why so secret 

 when it was just what all the friends of both of 



