RUMANIA: Playboy into Statesman

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Like most of the other 110,000,000 people who live in southeastern Europe, the Rumanians associate the old overlordship of Vienna, the Sultans and the Tsars with their primitive miseries. Hitler and Stalin are just two more potential overlords to them and, as never before, Rumanians cherish their nationalism and independence. When last August King Carol declared: "Our frontiers, traced in blood, cannot be altered without a world cataclysm," he got a resounding amen from his people.

The best indication that Rumanians, as well as their King, are convinced that the times are now too serious for comic opera, is the type of able younger men who have stepped into the Government. Most notable of these is Foreign Minister Gafencu, a World War I aviator with an intelligent and good-looking wife and the third largest paper in Bucharest (The Times, 150,000).

Dictator. After King Carol took dictatorial power, he formed a one-party State and made ministers personally responsible to the Crown. As Dictator-King he has handled his power firmly, even discreetly. Magda has retired more & more to her villa, where her hobby is raising white turkeys.

Not without some social vision, King Carol has helped peasants to buy farm implements, inaugurated new educational methods, built better roads, founded air lines. The Army, long deep in scandal, has been tidied up. There is still a long way to go, but the age-old corruption of Rumania, largely a heritage from Turkish days, is being rooted out. To be a Rumanian is no longer just a profession.

In International Affairs, Carol stuck faithfully by the Little Entente (CzechoSlovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia) until it collapsed. In the Munich crisis of 1938 he did not hesitate to declare that Rumania would live up to her treaties. His representative at Geneva even began conversations with the Soviet delegate to design ways & means whereby a Russian Army, going to the help of Czecho-Slovakia, could pass through Rumanian territory. Stanch friend of former Czecho-Slovak President Eduard Benes, King Carol turned down cold Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck's scheme for partitioning the Czech State.

Early this year the King paid a visit to the Court of St. James's, later dropped in on Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. He signed a trade treaty with Germany that looked like a complete national sellout, but the first thing he did when he got home was to shoot all the Nazi plotters he could find. During the summer he visited President Ismet Inönü of Turkey. When World War II started Rumania formally declared its neutrality, and none hoped more fervently than Carol II that Rumania would be able to keep it.

Last week all the Balkans talked fast and furiously on the subject of a Balkan, or Danubian, federation as one means whereby safety against Big Power aggression would be found in numbers.