ROUMANIA AND ITS RUBICON 



191 



farming of the country, they manage to 

 coax a rather bountiful crop out of the 

 soil. They produced 89,000,000 bushels 

 of wheat last year, an average of nearly 

 twenty bushels to the acre — a yield al- 

 most a third greater than our own. 

 Their corn crop amounted to 110,000,000 

 "bushels, or nearly twenty-two to the 

 acre. They also had a 29,000, ooo-bushel 

 crop of barley and an oat crop of similar 

 proportions. 



The year before, 19 14, they experi- 

 enced the throes of a crop failure, the 

 wheat yield being cut in half and other 

 cereal crops being sadly below normal. 



In normal years they have a big sur- 

 plus, with about 40,000,000 bushels of 

 corn, 50,000,000 bushels of wheat, and 

 11,000,000 bushels of barley to throw 

 into the world's markets. Heretofore, 

 since the outbreak of the war, the Cen- 

 tral Empires had been able to buy the 

 bulk of this surplus, and the blow of 

 Roumania's participation in the war will 

 probably be as heavy from an economic 

 as from a military standpoint. 



PECULIAR CUSTOMS, STRANGE 

 SUPERSTITIONS 



The great bulk of Roumania's popula- 

 tion belongs to the peasant class, for 

 there are comparatively few cities and 

 most of them are small. Many of these 

 peasants live on the great estates, where 

 their forebears for generations have 

 farmed for the absentee landlords. 



An interesting class these peasants 

 form, with their peculiar customs, their 

 striking superstitions, their primitive 

 ways of looking at things in general. 



The evil of race suicide has never in- 

 vaded rural Roumania. It is regarded as 

 worthy of honor to be the head of a nu- 

 merous family. As in all lands where 

 many of the people are more or less illit- 

 erate, there is a high death rate, though 

 the fact that the bottle-fed baby is almost 

 unknown in peasant Roumania tends to 

 overcome the high infant mortality that 

 would otherwise result. 



That they are a fecund folk is revealed 

 by the fact that, although their death rate 

 is high, they still have an annual excess 

 of 118,000 births over deaths. Apply 

 that same ratio of increase to the Ameri- 



can people, and without a single immi- 

 grant we would grow at the rate of more 

 than a million and a half a year — fifteen 

 million or more between census years. 

 Yet, even with our enormous immigra- 

 tion, between 1904 and 1913, inclusive, we 

 grew only a little more than 14,000,000. 



The average Roumanian peasant is not 

 given to the kind of thrift that leads him 

 often to a savings bank. The patrimony 

 of his sons and daughters is more often 

 good will, good health, and an honest 

 mind than it is land, or money, or houses. 

 So narrow is the margin upon which a 

 young couple starts out in life that it has 

 come to be a proverb among them, "Mar- 

 ried today and out at the elbows tomor- 

 row." For children come apace, and the 

 prices of the things the peasant has to sell 

 are even lower than the prices of those 

 he has to buy, and not until his own la- 

 bors are supplemented by those of sons 

 and daughters has he much chance to pre- 

 pare for even the shortest of rainy days. 



When a young Roumanian peasant 

 lad's thoughts turn to love and his mind 

 begins to incline toward marriage, he goes 

 to his mother rather than to his sweet- 

 heart with his tale. He tells her all about 

 it, but rarely thinks of confiding the happy 

 secret to his father ; for Roumanian peas- 

 ant fathers have faced the stern realities 

 of life so long that they are apt to forget 

 that they were once boys, and therefore 

 have little sympathy with love-lorn tales. 



IP THE EIRE BURNS, LOVE TRIUMPHS 



But the mother acts as ambassador to 

 the father, and if he can be induced to 

 look with favor upon the lover's choice, 

 he calls in two of his best friends in the 

 village, tells them of the son's dreams, 

 and asks them to accompany the said son 

 to the house of the object of love's young 

 dream. Mayhap the girl herself has not 

 yet received from the youth a single hint of 

 his love ; but even so, as he and his spokes- 

 men approach the house she suspects the 

 object of his visit and peeps through any 

 crack or cranny that is convenient. 



If it happens to be winter, the father 

 of the girl invites the company in, and, 

 surmising their mission, gives some hint 

 as to his attitude by the way he looks 

 after the fire. If he keeps it burning 



