It must be confessed--and, indeed, it has been avowed by prominent Rumanians themselves[40]--that Rumania's evasion of the Treaty of Berlin has been a monument of resourceful duplicity and bad faith. Accomplished by pretending to regard the native Jews as foreigners, it actually placed them in a far worse position than they had held in 1858, when at any rate their national character as Moldavians or Wallachians was not contested. But, not only have they been refused emancipation and stamped as foreigners, but, in their character of foreigners, without a State to protect them, they have been made the victims of special and cruel disabilities, which in practice do not and cannot affect other foreigners. One peculiarly barbarous act of persecution of this kind which was attempted in 1902 nearly brought about a serious intervention by the Great Powers to compel Rumania to observe her Treaty obligations. An Act was passed by the Rumanian Parliament forbidding foreigners to exercise any handicraft in Rumania unless Rumanians were assured similar privileges in the parent States of such foreigners. The result of this Act would have been to deprive all the Jewish artizans in Rumania of the means of earning their livelihood, as, being foreigners without a parent State of their own, they could not prove the reciprocity required by the law. Prompt steps were taken to bring this project to the notice of the Great Powers, chiefly by the late Lord Rothschild in London and Mr. Jacob Schiff in Washington. Lord Rothschild was the first to move. In June 1901 he forwarded to His Majesty's Government an elaborate Memorandum setting forth the intolerable situation of the Rumanian Jews and especially emphasising its international dangers as a stimulus of undesirable immigration in other countries.[41] At the same time he brought all his great influence to bear privately on individual members of the Government. From Lord Lansdowne he received the warmest sympathy, and the Foreign Office at once set inquiries on foot with a view to ascertaining whether combined action by the Powers signatory of the Berlin Treaty would be practicable. The responses, however, were not encouraging.[42] Meanwhile the action of the London Jews had been communicated to Mr. Oscar Straus in New York, and he persuaded Mr. Schiff to bring the question to the knowledge of President Roosevelt. The President, deeply moved by Mr. Schiff's story, acted with characteristic energy. In July 1902 the Secretary of State, Mr. John Hay, under the guise of a despatch giving instructions to the United States Minister at Athens in regard to certain negotiations then pending for a Naturalisation Treaty with Rumania, formulated a powerful indictment of the persecutions. Three weeks later the American Ambassadors in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Rome, and Constantinople were instructed to communicate this despatch to the Governments to which they were accredited, and to ascertain from them