The half-million Ruthenians who inhabit the mountains of northeastern Hungary form a secluded and backward population which has hitherto been supremely indifferent to the affairs of the outside world. Alone among the races of Hungary, they had no national movement and probably very little consciousness of nationality. Before the War they had not a single school in which their language was taught, no political newspaper of any kind, and scarcely any educated class. What went on in these primitive and illiterate heads when the gospel of self-determination penetrated to them, it is difficult to guess. There are tales that within a very few weeks three so-called National Assemblies were held, each claiming to represent the ‘Carpatho-Ruthenian nation,’ and that these rival gatherings ‘self-determined’ their people, the one for union with Czecho-Slovakia, the second for union with Hungary, and the third for union with their kinsmen over the mountains in Galicia. At any rate, the Czechophile tendency appears to have been the strongest. Going on the best evidence it could get as to the preferences of this enigmatic population, the Peace Conference has decided to attach them to Czecho-Slovakia, though under the form of an autonomous province with generous rights of self-government. An ideal which has haunted the minds of Roumanian patriots for a century, but which long seemed only an iridescent dream, has been realized by the annexation to Roumania of Transylvania and the adjacent zone of territory on the west. This aspiring kingdom has now very nearly attained the frontiers of Trajan’s province of Dacia; and everyone knows with what ardor the modern Roumanians claim that they are descended from the Roman colonists sent out to Dacia in Trajan’s time. Contrary to what appears to be widely believed in this country, Roumania’s acquisitions, with the possible exception of some small contentious border districts, are based strictly upon the principle of nationality. They serve to liberate over three millions of Roumanians, who, among all the subject peoples of Hungary, were the race most hated and oppressed by the Magyars, because of their numbers and the tenacity of their patriotism. It is true that in eastern Transylvania several large compact bodies of Magyars and Germans (900,000 of the former, 200,000 of the latter) are now transferred to Roumanian rule. But this is unavoidable in the case of such isolated enclaves. The Germans apparently do not object seriously; and as for the Magyars, it would be impossible to leave them to Hungary without cutting off a far larger number of Roumanians from their mother country. But of all the dramatic changes of fortune in Eastern Europe, there is none more striking than this one, which has put down the mighty Magyars from their seats, and exalted the humble Roumanian, for eight hundred years a slave and an outcast in his own country.