An amusing illustration has been given of the ignorance of these revolutionary peasants in 1848. Some of them, having broken into a nobleman’s mansion, discovered a packet of old letters in a drawer, and believing these to be patents of nobility, they proceeded to burn them in front of the portrait of one of the family ancestors, exclaiming, tauntingly, “See, proud lord, how thy family becomes once more as ignoble as we ourselves are!” Few races possess in such a marked degree the blind and immovable sense of nationality which characterizes the Roumanians: they hardly ever mingle with the surrounding races, far less adopt manners and customs foreign to their own; and it is a remarkable fact that the seemingly stronger-minded and more manly Hungarians are absolutely powerless to influence them even in cases of intermarriage. Thus the Hungarian woman who weds a Roumanian husband will necessarily adopt the dress and manners of his people, and her children will be as good Roumanians as though they had no drop of Magyar blood in their veins; while the Magyar who takes a Roumanian girl for his wife will not only fail to convert her to his ideas, but himself, subdued by her influence, will imperceptibly begin to lose his nationality. This is a fact well known and much lamented by the Hungarians themselves, who live in anticipated apprehension of seeing their people ultimately dissolving into Roumanians. This singular tenacity of the Roumanians to their own manners and customs is doubtless due to the influence of their religion, which teaches them that any deviation from their own established rules is sinful—which, as I have said before, is the whole pivot of Roumanian thought and action. In some districts where an attempt was made in the time of Maria Theresa to replace the Greek popas by other clergymen belonging to the united faith, the inhabitants simply absented themselves from all church attendance or reception of the sacraments; and there are instances on record of villages whose churches remained closed for over thirty years, because the people could not be induced to accept the change. As to that portion of the Transylvanian Roumanians which in 1698 consented to embrace the united faith, their separation from their schismatic brethren is but a skin-deep one after all, having no influence whatsoever on their customs and superstitions, or on the strong bond of nationality which holds them all together. It is a notable fact that among all Oriental races the ideas of religion and nationality are inextricably bound together. So with the Roumanians, whose language has no other word wherewith to express religion or confession but _lege_, law—obviously derived from the Latin _lex_.