The population of the new state is nearly doubled. From about 9,000,000 Rumania finds herself with more than 16,000,000. The addition of Bessarabia has brought 2,000,000 new citizens whose preponderant Rumanian element had never enjoyed political and economic conditions very different from those that prevailed in the old Kingdom. But the Rumanians of Hungary have had a radically different background. Taken as a whole, they are far more advanced than the Rumanians of the Kingdom. Having had to struggle for centuries against Magyarization, they fought for a hold on the land and for control of industries. They have been widely trained in the importance of exercising suffrage as a means of combating the Magyars. Their language and primary education and their church have been weapons essential to their separate existence and the growth of national feeling. Hence it is that with universal suffrage, which they alone know how to use, the Rumanians of Hungary threatened to become the dominant element in Greater Rumania. Their leaders do not belong to the aristocracy but come directly from the soil. From the moment of their entry into the Parliament of Bucharest, they dispossessed the old politicians, who were servants of the landed aristocracy. They demanded the removal of the capital from the Kingdom to Transylvania, suggesting Kronstadt (Brasso). When the first Parliament of Greater Rumania assembled, the old politicians of the Kingdom tried to get King Ferdinand to appoint a premier and approve the formation of a cabinet without regard to the parliamentary majority. Jonescu and Averescu signified their willingness to “save Rumania.” Their plea was that the actual constitutional union had not yet taken place, and that Rumania was in a transitional stage, without definite frontiers and without international recognition. Until the treaties with the defeated coalition were ratified by the Allies, and until some general policy was adopted by the victorious coalition in regard to Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and common financial questions, they argued that the new Parliament was not in a position to function constitutionally as the law-making body of the new Rumanian political organism. In the Acts of Union, did not the Rumanians of Hungary and Austria and Russia expressly stipulate their local autonomy? The bases of the new Rumanian state and the authority of its united Parliament had yet to be worked out. The thesis was plausible and would have won the day for the time being, had it not been for differences of opinion among the political leaders of the old Kingdom. There was also the fear shared by all that the Rumanians could not hold out against the Supreme Council in the matter of the treaties unless the new Parliament was regarded as constitutional and authoritative, not transitional.