RUMANIA: Playboy into Statesman

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Early in 1914 two royal matchmakers—Nicholas II, last Tsar of All the Russias, and Marie, then Rumania's British-born Crown Princess—put their heads together and decided it would be nice for both their countries if Marie's elder son Carol and Nicholas' eldest daughter Olga were to marry. To push the romance along, Marie and her husband, Crown Prince Ferdinand, took Carol on a trip to Tsarkoye Selo, the Tsar's winter palace outside St. Petersburg, and later His Imperial Majesty & family visited the Rumanian royalty at Constantsa, on the Black Sea.

Important hitch in the plan, however, was that Prince Carol, who after all had to do the proposing, balked. Then 20 years old, for five years he had been allowed by indulgent parents to taste the pleasures of Bucharest, and already he was beginning to show decided independence in his choice of women. Instead of making up to the rather plain, high-cheek-boned Grand Duchess Olga, he took a fancy to the prettier and more vivacious Grand Duchess Tatiana, the Tsar's second oldest daughter. Since this was not on the schedule, the matchmakers called the whole affair off, and His Imperial Majesty at length showed his distaste not only for Carol but for the entire Rumanian royal family by coining one of his very rare epigrams: "Rumania, bah! It is neither a State nor a nation, but a profession."

But the choosy Balkan Prince had the last laugh on the proud Emperor of Holy Russia. By 1918 Nicholas Romanov had lost his job and his life: by 1930 not only was Carol Hohenzollern very much alive, but after four-and-a-half years of self-exile, he was back in Bucharest and able truthfully to describe his profession to Rumania's census-takers as "mostly a king," secondarily a "farmer." The Tsar lost his throne primarily because he did not know his job. Rumania and the world have become gradually convinced that Farmer-King Carol thoroughly knows all the ins & outs of how to be a King in the Balkans.

Grabby Neighbors. It takes considerable work and ability to be a Balkan ruler nowadays and, particularly in Rumania, the job will not get any easier in the months to come. The old "Playboy of the Balkans," now 46, runs a country of 20,000,000 people whose 113,884 square miles, rich in oil and cereals, are not only the most prosperous in their part of the world, but the most coveted by grabby neighbors.

Of four nations that border on Rumania's frontier (Russia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria) only Yugoslavia can be considered as definitely friendly. The U.S.S.R. has never given up its claim to Bessarabia on the east, and last week Rumanians feared that as soon as Joseph Stalin was through talking with Finnish statesmen, he would send for King Carol's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Grigore Gafencu. Not for a moment has Hungary forgotten that the Treaties of Trianon and Versailles took Transylvania from her and gave it to Rumania. Most irredentist of all is Bulgaria, which has insisted year in & out that the southeastern province of Dobruja, which Rumania grabbed in the Second Balkan War of 1913, be returned.