But even more noteworthy than the wild Kazan ravine and the wonderful Roman thoroughfare is the celebrated Iron Gate at the confines of Serbia, Hungary and Roumania. This narrow defile long constituted an almost impassable barrier to intercourse between the peoples of the upper and lower Danube. During low water, navigation, except for the smallest craft, was impossible, until the completion, in 1896, of a channel which was blasted out of the living rock on the Serbian side of the seething cataract. This canal guarantees a sufficient depth of water the entire year for steamers of considerable draft and contributes enormously to the importance of the Danube as a highway of international commerce. Shortly below the Iron Gate we were shown remains of the mammoth stone bridge which was built by Trajan across the Danube. This was even a more astonishing achievement than the construction of the roadway through the gorge of Kazan. I had often admired the wonderful, lifelike reliefs of Trajan’s column in Rome, which represent, among other things, the celebrated campaign of the emperor in Dacia, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to contemplate the remains of the road and the bridge he built during this memorable period of his reign. Dacia, which embraced modern Roumania, is noted as being the only province that the Romans ever possessed north of the Danube. And “the last province to be won, it was,” as Freeman puts it, “the first to be given up; for Aurelian withdrew from it and transferred its name to the Mœsian land, immediately south of the Danube.”[18] But the remarkable thing about Roumania, as the same eminent historian observes, is that although it has been cut off “for so many ages from all Roman influences, forming, as it has done, one of the great highways of barbarian migration, a large part of Dacia, namely, the modern Roumanian principality, still keeps its Roman language no less than Spain and Gaul. In one way the land is to this day more Roman than Spain or Gaul, as its people still call themselves by the Roman name.”[19] The Roumanians are not only proud of their Roman origin but take special pleasure in recalling the fact, especially when conversing with foreigners. “We are,” they will tell you, “neither Slavs, nor Germans, nor Turks; we are Roumanians.” Roumania, they will insist, is a Latin islet in the midst of a Slavic and Finnish ocean which surrounds it. This island when known as Dacia was in reality a new Italy and its inhabitants were the Italians of the Danube and the Carpathians. In a recent speech delivered in Rome, the distinguished Roumanian historian, V. A. Urechia, proudly claimed the capital of the Cæsars as the mother of his country--“_Nous sommes ici pour dire à tout le monde que Rome est noire mère._”