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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



From the standpoint of material value, 

 Bessarabia would be worth more to Rou- 

 mania than Transylvania. It is one of 

 the richest provinces of Russia, and, with 

 the Pruth on the one side and the Dnies- 

 ter on the other, it is ideally watered, no 

 place within its boundaries being more 

 than forty miles from a navigable stream. 

 With the exception of a few miles of its 

 Bukowina boundary, it is entirely sur- 

 rounded by water — the Dniester, the 

 Pruth, the Danube, and the Black Sea. 

 Kishinef , which is remembered with hor- 

 ror as the scene of the frightful Jewish 

 massacre of a few years ago, is its cap- 

 ital. 



The southeastern corner of Bessarabia 

 lies only a dozen miles or so from the 

 great Black Sea port of Odessa — the 

 New York of southern Russia. 



SURROUNDED BY VAST SLAVIC SKA 



The climate is, on the whole, salubri- 

 ous, and while the northern part is some- 

 what mountainous, through the presence 

 of the outlying spurs of the southeastern 

 Carpathians, the bulk of the territory lies 

 in a rolling farming country that has pro- 

 duced marvelously, considering the poor 

 farming methods practised, and is calla- 

 ble of great crop yields under modern 

 conditions of cultivation. There is much 

 of that rich black soil that has made Illi- 

 nois, Iowa, and Kansas famous for their 

 agriculture. 



Bukowina is an Austrian crownland 

 traversed by offshoots of the Carpathi- 

 ans, and famous for its horses and cattle. 

 It has many fine forests, numerous rich 

 mines, and its people have been thrifty 

 and industrious. It has belonged to Aus- 

 tria for nearly a century and a half, hav- 

 ing been ceded to that country by Turkey 

 in 1777. It is populated by a veritable 

 congress of races, with the Slav and the 

 Roumanian w'ell in the majority. Where 

 once the effort was to Germanize the 

 Roumanian, the encroachments of the 

 Slav led Teuton and Roumanian to stand 

 together against his powers of absorp- 

 tion. 



Surrounded on every side by the Slavic 

 Sea — the deep ocean of Russia, the bay 

 of Serbia, and the gulf of Bulgaria — 

 who can say whether in future centuries 

 the attrition of the Slavic tide will wear 

 away the Roumanian shore, or whether 

 this present great war will fix political 

 boundaries that will be as firm as the 

 geographic boundaries themselves? 



Remembering how she has been ex- 

 cluded from peace conferences in the 

 past, how even her right to be heard in 

 the Congress of Berlin was gainsaid, how 

 she usually has lost in the field of diplo- 

 macy whatever she has won on the field 

 of war, she probably has had an under- 

 standing this time that, in the event of 

 an allied victory, will insure her the ter- 

 ritorial expansion she craves and salva- 

 tion from the strangulation she fears. 



