Land & Water 
May 30, 1918 
tliL' sea. A> Ills o\m maritime coiiuiuin- ua> destroyed no 
civilian sailors or unarmed passengers of liis own people suffered 
inconvenience, let alone indiscriminate murder by sea. The 
war was still to the German the thing it had been for us 
in the past before the present campaign : Lamentable for 
death and privation, but not affecting the core of the nation, 
its soil, its tissue as it were. 
The development of our great raids of reprisal have 
changed all that, and they .will continue to change it more 
and more. 
The Treaty of Bucharest 
' I ^1 
|HK President of the United States was heard every- 
■ where in Europe when he said recently that the 
\ intervention of his people concerned Russia just as 
much as it did Belgium. 
That phrase might l)e expanded to mean that the 
.American Government had appreciated a truth which in 
this paper was emphasised continually many months ago, 
when it was hardly grasped, which is fundamental to the 
whole war : if Prussia can establish a Central Europe con- ■ 
trolling the East she has won the war, no matter what happens 
on the West ; and the conception of Allied victory in the 
West side by side with a free hand for Prussia in the East is 
meaningless. If we really win in the West we win all. 
I'nlcss we liberate the East we lose all. 
Now, the Rumanian Treaty, of which more details are 
now before us, confirms and increases this vital conviction. 
The details of the document vastly develop the judgment 
farmed upon the first news of it — a judgment which my 
readers may recall. Those details (which can now be studied 
fully and at leisure) show Prussia producing, as we said three 
weeks ago, ^federal State, of which the new, humiliated, and 
half-absorbed Rumanian could be taken as a typical member. 
But they also show the complete control which Prussia 
assumes in the formation of the new State, the deliberated 
exclusion of all Western influence, the pretence or confidence 
of moulding this particular element at will (as Poland, 
Lithuania, and Finland will later be moulded), and the 
presence before our eyes of a Prussian Empire in the making. 
An Empire which could make nothing of Europe, it is true, 
but might well destroy what it was too base to understand, 
and would certainly destroy ourselves. 
The Treaty of Bucharest was signed at 11 a.m. upon 
Tuesday, May 7th, at Catroceni. Kuhlmann was in the 
chair. He sat in the same place as had seen the declaration 
of war issued by Rumania against the Central Powers. It 
was a complete triumph. 
The Treaty of Bucharest consists in 31 articles, arranged 
in eight chapters. 
There are three special points in -the text of the Treaty 
to which I would direct the attention of my readers. 
The first point is this : That the political future of Rumania 
is left entirely at the mercy of the conqueror. 
Article 4 (in chapter H.) leaves only 20,000 Rumanian 
infantry in being. But this tiny force is not independent. 
.•\rticle 5, of the same chapter, puts all military material 
under the direct control of the Austro-German Army of 
occupation. Article 6 subjects to the military authority of 
the victors the movements of every Rumanian officer, even 
for the shortest journey. Article 7 puts Austro-German 
officers into intimate connection with every unit. There is 
no power of political autonomy left to Rumania by this 
act. All is for the moment in enemy hands. 
The second point is the destruction of all power over the 
great international highway of the Danube save that of the 
Central Powers. It is exceedingly important. It speci- 
fically eliminates the old right of Europe as a whole in this 
highway, and treats Russia as non-existent. It prevents 
even Bulgaria having the hold we thought it had when we 
first heard of the treaty. For by sub-section B of article 10, 
chapter 1 1 1., the mouths of the river are specifically handed over 
not to Bulgaria, but to a "Committee of the four Allied 
Powers." 
Now, this is something new in Europe. It is curious that 
so vital an innovation shouM not have been seized by the 
public. It is the very magnitude of the war, and the fact 
that all is still complete in suspense which accounts for the 
misapprehension of the thing. 
In the first place, here is Prussia (at the head of the New 
Central European State) arranging matters so that she can 
reserve to herself in the future all the bargaining between 
Bulgaria and Turkey. The northern part of the Dobrudja 
— including the town of Constanza, the great grain port — is 
put into commission, as it were. It is in the hands of a 
Round Table, with Prussia in the chair. Turkey and Bulgaria 
are now attendants upon the final decision, but that decision 
will virtually leave neither Turkey nor Bulgaria possessed of 
the mouths of the Danube. It will leave each expectant, 
dependent, and weakened. 
In the second place, Europe, as Europe, has ceased to 
exist where the Danube is concerned. Now the Danube is 
the artery of Europe in the East. The Lower Danube is 
the road by which most cheaply and most easily the grain 
and the oil and all other products of the Hungarian Plain 
and the Northern Balkans and the vast Rumanian cornfield 
reaches the rest of the world This Lower Danube was 
hitherto by treaty almost like the sea. There were particular 
rights, jealously guarded, general and international rights 
more jealously guarded still. The Russian' Empire was the 
great countervailing weight which kept that highway open. 
The Russian Empire has disappeared. 
I have said that this Treaty of Bucharest treats Russia as 
non-existent, and perhaps that negative point is the most 
striking point of all. There was a time when Great Britain 
turned her foreign policy and her claim to a part in the world 
upon her power to support or to control, to restrain or to 
defend, those who held the entry to the Black Sea. There 
was a timt when the Western Powers, and England in par- 
ticular, were not only members, but the chief members of 
that European Committee which counted the Lower Valley 
of the Danube as something within its purview. The Treaty 
of Bucharest i>rofesses to open a new era and to say that all 
this is now closed to the West. The Danube is mastered by 
one Power, as the Rhine in the early nineteenth century was 
to our permanent loss mastered in its middle reaches, mastered 
in its upper reaches in 1870, and as Prussia would master it 
to-morrow in its lower reaches and its mouths. 
One might write a history of political expansion in terms of 
the great streams which, when several nations are indepen- 
dent, arc common highways, but which when one attains 
hegemony are the first objects of the new Power. There are 
not many such, but the Volga made the autocracy of Russia ; 
the Lower Mississippi was the test of the complete continental 
control by the American States and the exclusion of European 
power ; the Rhine and the Danube, very much more than 
either of these other examples, will be the test of whether 
this new Power of Central Europe under Prussia shall remain 
erect or not. During the long centuries of civilisation, for a 
thousand years, since the evangelisation of Hungary, nine 
hiuidred years ago, of the right bank of the Rhine a couple 
of centuries before, the two great sti earns have been the 
common inheritance and the common communication of 
many and various members in the community of Christendom. 
The Rhine first passed almost entirely into one hand : A 
political peril supported by academic pedantry. Its last 
issues towards the sea (which include the great harbour of 
the Scheldt) are, if Prussia has her way, to be absorbed into 
the Central European system directly or indirectly. 
And now it is the turn of the Danube. Between the Iron 
Gates and the Black Sea the Danube is, according to the 
Treaty of Bucharest, to be under the control of the new 
State — that is, to be a Prussian thing. 
So much for the first two points. Rumanian political 
independence is held in suspense at the will of the conqueror, 
to be released by degrees, and moulded plastically at his will, 
until the new State takes its place in the Federal system of 
Central Europe, just as the archbishopric of Cologne was 
absorbed into the State of Prussia a hundred years ago, and 
just as Hanover and Frankfurt were absorbed within living 
memory. That was the first point. The second point was 
the seizure of the Danube valley, the elimination of any real 
power over it from the Iron Gates to the sea save that of the 
Central Powers under the domination of Prussia. 
Nq Guarantees 
The third point is the fact that for the first time in any 
so-called tieaty of peace a nation left nominally independent 
IS also, by the Treaty of Bucharest, left without any guarantees 
for its economic freedom. 
Chapter iV. of the treaty is as significant as anything that 
has appeared m modern history. It is entitled " Indemnities 
of War." It has only two sentences. In the first, both 
