Owing to Roumania's grievances against Russia--whose seizure of Bessarabia nearly forty years ago left a wound which festered for years and has only recently been cicatrized--King Carol concluded a military convention with the Austro-Hungarian empire, the stipulations of which have never been authoritatively disclosed. There is reason to believe that one clause obliged the Roumanian Government to come to the support of the Habsburg Monarchy with all its military resources in case that empire should be wantonly attacked by another Power. Whether this instrument, which was never laid before the Roumanian legislature for ratification, is deemed to have been vitiated by the lack of this indispensable sanction, or is assumed to have terminated with the decease of the king who concluded it, is a matter of no real moment. The relevant circumstance is the unwillingness of Austria-Hungary to invoke the terms of the convention and the resolve of the Bucharest Cabinet to ignore them. Thus Roumania, like all other neutral states, was well within the sphere of attraction of the Central Empires long before the present conflict was unchained. And the clever tactics by which siege was laid to the sympathies of a nation which at bottom has hardly any traits in common with the besieger, would have entailed a complete revision and remodelling of the polity of Russia, France and Britain, had these Powers had any coherent programme or distant aims. But their motto was: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. True, none of those States ever designed a political revolution of the Old Continent, such as Napoleon had imagined or Germany is now striving to realize. But neither did they read aright nor even give serious thought to the symptoms of the great conspiracy which was being hatched by others for that purpose. Busied with their party squabbles and social reforms, they took it for granted that international tranquillity which was a condition of the stability of all internal affairs was assured. Such occasional misunderstandings as might crop up among the Powers could, they imagined, always be smoothed over by manifestations of goodwill and timely concessions. Fitfulness and hesitancy marked every attempt made by Germany's rivals to push their trade or extend their political relations beyond their own borders.