The westward path of the Asiatic herdsmen beyond South Russia led them into Moldavia and Wallachia, where the native Vlach population sought refuge in the Carpathians and in the hills of the centre of the Balkan Peninsula. It is a population with a language of Latin syntactical affinities, and a 60 per cent. Slav vocabulary, and is spoken by people who looked back with pride to the days of Roman occupation of their land as Dacia. So the Vlach people, essentially Central European round-heads like the Slavs generally, have come to be distinct from their neighbours in speech and in pride. In the matter of religion the openness of the Danube entry and the coastal ways up the west side of the Black Sea have made the people members of the Eastern Church so far as Moldavia and Wallachia are concerned, but the Vlachs of the Transylvanian hills are, or were, to a large extent members of the Uniate Church (p. 70), intermediate, as has been said, between the Roman and the Eastern. After centuries of subjection and fractionization the Vlach peoples have (1919) suddenly found themselves united in the new Rumania, with the political and agrarian influence wrested from {80} their former Magyar, Szekler, and German lords, and the peasantry of Wallachia and Moldavia have also secured a good deal of the land previously in aristocratic, though in this case often not alien hands. The old direction of the country was in the hands of the aristocracy, and was often much criticized in the west. The Jewish and German town populations were said to be specially held down. Whether the new government will merely continue the old with a peasant admixture or whether it will seek to take a new line, remains to be seen. It is at any rate interesting that this large language group is, for the first time, a governmental unit, and tragic that so inexperienced a group has within it such large and, for that matter, valuable elements of alien language. It is said that the Oriental aspect of society is well marked in the lesser towns, the greater having been westernized, but it is questionable whether we should not be more correct in describing these lesser towns as more resembling our own in early mediaeval times before the garden-closes were built upon to accommodate people crowding within their walls for protection.