THE WHIRLPOOL OF THE BALKANS 



193 



day again bring her 

 forth triumphant in 

 those victories which 

 peace possesses no less 

 than war. 



RUMANIA, THE ARGEN- 

 TINA OP THE NEAR 

 EAST 



Rumania is in, 

 rather than of, the 

 Balkan States. Claim- 

 ing a Roman origin, 

 speaking a Latin 

 tongue, ruled in her 

 formative days by a 

 German king more 

 Hohenzollern than the 

 Kaiser even, the king- 

 dom has nothing in 

 common with her 

 neighbors except a 

 formal adherence to 

 the Orthodox faith. 



Rumania is the Ar- 

 gentine of the Near 

 East, a land where 

 fortunes have been 

 amassed with incredi- 

 ble rapidity; where it 

 is unfashionable to 

 live within one's in- 

 come ; where society 

 has a gayer tone than 

 one can easily depict. 



Bucharest, the capi- 

 tal, vaunts itself as 

 the Paris of the Near 

 East, and other Ru- 

 manian cities have 

 grown rapidly. Sinaia, 

 in the Carpathian 

 foothills, is the sum- 

 mer capital, gay with hotels and villas 

 surrounding the palace of the King, and 

 thither betake the court, the diplomatic 

 circle, and the rich upon the approach of 

 the summer heat, which makes Bucharest 

 intolerable. 



On the shores of the Black Sea, at the 

 mouth of the Danube, and elsewhere are 

 other charming resorts ; but Rumania as 

 a whole is a vast wheat field, the granary 

 indeed of the Near East, from which 

 feeds many a mouth from Constantza to 

 Cattaro. 



A TWO-MAN SAW MUX IN 



Photograph by H. G. Dwight 

 CONSTANTINOPLE 



There are four cities in the world that belong to the whole world 

 rather than to any one nation, according to Viscount Bryce, the 

 distinguished British statesman. They are Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, 

 and Constantinople. For fifteen hundred years Constantinople has 

 been a seat of empire, and for an even longer period the emporium 

 of a commerce to which the events of our own time give a growing 

 magnitude. 



Come we now to Greece, the land of 

 song and story, the birthplace of modern 

 history, the cradle of philosophy, the 

 home of art and architecture, the scene 

 of varied human fortunes, where cluster 

 the finest traditions of our race — the land 

 which T know best of all the foreign 

 world and which has won and retains my 

 constant and increasing admiration. 



To separate the life of modern Greece 

 from the splendors of its classic or By- 

 zantine days is not easy, and the Greeks 

 themselves would be the first to resent it. 



