Briefly to sum up the respective merits of these three races, it may be allowable to define them as representing manhood in the past, present, and future tenses. The Saxons _have been_ men, and right good men, too, in their day; but that day has gone by, and they are now rapidly degenerating into mere fossil antiquities, physically deteriorated from constant intermarriage, and morally opposed to any sort of progress involving amalgamation with the surrounding races. The Hungarians _are_ men in the full sense of the word, perhaps all the more so that they are a nation of soldiers rather than men of science and letters. The Roumanians _will be_ men a few generations hence, when they have had time to shake off the habits of slavery and have learned to recognize their own value. There is a wealth of unraised treasure, of abilities in the raw block, of uncultured talent, lying dormant in this ignorant peasantry, who seem but lately to have begun to understand that they need not always bend their neck beneath the yoke of other masters, nor are necessarily born to slavery and humiliation. In face of their rapidly increasing population, of the thirst for knowledge and the powerful spirit of progress which have arisen among them of late years, it is scarcely hazardous to prophesy that this people have a great future before them, and that a day will come when, other nations having degenerated and spent their strength, these descendants of the ancient Romans, rising phœnix-like from their ashes, will step forward with a whole fund of latent power and virgin material to rule as masters where formerly they have crouched as slaves. Two popular legends current in Transylvania may here find a place, as somewhat humorously defining the national characteristics of the three races just alluded to. “When God had decreed to banish Adam and Eve from Paradise because they had sinned against his laws, he first deputed his Hungarian angel Gabor (Gabriel) to chase them out of the garden of Eden. But Adam and Eve were already wise, for they had eaten of the fruit of knowledge; so they resolved to conciliate the angel by putting good cheer before him, and inviting him to partake of it. In truth, the angel ate and drank heartily of the good things on the table, and, after having eaten, he had not the heart to repay his kind hosts for their hospitality by chasing them out of Paradise, so he returned to heaven without having executed his commission, and begged the Lord to send another in his place, for he could not do it.