IN OTHER LANDS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 237, 6 October 1928, Page 17 (Supplement)

IN OTHER LANDS

CHANGING RUMANIA A DAY WITH THE PEASANTS Rumania has just seen the most remarkable manifestation of the national will in recent history. Her entire peasantry has sworn to work for a new Rumania. A peasant knight-errancy has come into being, a peasant crusade has been launched. And these moccasined knights will make their country a mother for all her children. In free Rumania there is martial law, a censorship, an enormous army and an ever-wakeful secret police. High taxes are collected, heavy obligations imposed, and many restrictions enforced. And the free and united Rumanian people are learning what many have learned before: that not only eternal vigilance, but an eternal struggle is the price of liberty. So they gathered at their citadel of freedom in response to the call of one of their leaders, Juliu Maniu, president of the National Peasant Party. Here they waited —waited for freedom. They occupied two enormous adjacent squares and stood around about five speakers’ stands. Tens of thousands of them, scores of thousands, one hundred and twenty, or a hundred and fifty thousand.

Most of them came on foot; some a distance of twenty miles; others forty, sixty and even a hundred miles. They walked days and nights over high mountains and long, wearisome plains in the dark and cold. Each carried a homespun bag containing bread and fat salt pork. Some were barefooted, many rather poorly dressed. They sat by the roadside to eat and rest. They slept under skies that drenched them with rain. But they came to Alba Julia.

Many of these people have debts secured by mortgages and now their mortgages may soon be foreclosed. Others may want to borrow money to-morrow, but rich people are not inclined to lend to peasants who protest. These marked men may have local enemies and now it will be easier for such enemies to have them put in jail. Perhaps there have been questions of the payment of delayed taxes. Now there will be no more delay. Koon the assessor will have to appraise these men’s fields, and would he be doing any more than his duty if he were a little hard on protestors? And if you had mingled with these people you would have seen very stern and very solemn faces, jaws tightly set and lips tensely drawn. It is not from rage, but from intense desire, from hopes that have been almost turned to despair. And if you had stopped any group from any village and asked the men in it what they came for, someone would immediately pipe up in English —for many of them are returned immigrants from the United States—and would say, “Mister, we can’t live no more.” You would hear these four simple words repeated many times, “Can’t live no more.”

Here in the square on that memorable day every sort of peasant was assembled. Besides old peasants there were many men in the prime of life. It is they "who manage the little farms, pay the taxes, feed the children and keep things going. Every day away from home counts for them, but they left their plows to come and try to help inaugurate a better regime in their free country. Most numerous of all were the boys and young men, impatient to do something to make freedom seem more real.

They appear without guile, earnest, sincere, simple, unspoiled by politics. They have no personal pretensions whatsoever of a political nature. They are not looking for state jobs. They do not aspire to big things. They make very humble demands. They just want to live better. They imagine that with a little better political management they might not have to be so poor. They are not against the monarchy. They don’t say anything against the form of Government. They haven’t the slightest desire to change the social order. They love their country, consider the unity of the nation inviolable, and do not desire revolution. And they believe that the change would come if there were more civic liberty, more administrative legality, more justice according to established laws. They say that if they had a regime of legality, liberty and justice, they could in time change the whole economic situation. They are convinced that Juliu Maniu and the National Peasant Partv would establish a regime of liberty and legality. They say that the whole nation wants that, so they demand that Maniu be given a chance. And they are determined to work for the realisation of a new Rumania, which shall be a mother to all her children. And some day that Rumania will come. It is coming. It is advancing step by step. First freedom from the Turk. Then freedom from all the other foreign masters. Then all the provinces united in an indivisible whole. Then the land distributed. Then universal manhood suffrage. Then thousands of new schools erected. And now the peasants pressing on toward economic security and their share of political influence. ;