Peasant March

The Fascist march on Rome was wholly militant and partially armed. It compelled a quavering cabinet to yield, to vanish. Very different was a march upon Bucharest last week, staged by 60,000 peaceful peasants. Their revered leader, Dr. Juliu Maniu, threatened no more than that the peasants would wait quietly in the streets for four days, meanwhile petitioning Premier Vintila Bratiano to resign.

Strangely enough, although M. Bratiano heads an intensely militant oligarchy of land owners and industrialists--although he dominates the police and the army--there was a possibility that he might resign, or at least so reorganize his cabinet as to give the peasants a voice in the government, which they have not had for decades.

The nation is not so ready to accept the dictatorship of Vintila Bratiano, a single-track pedantic conservative, as it was to obey his late brother Jon Bratiano, that born dictator and multitalented statesman (TIME, Dec. 5). Moreover the 60,000 waiting, shuffling peasants must have been a strong reminder that if the House of Bratiano had ever permitted a fair election to be held in Rumania during the past decade, it would certainly have been swept out of power by the peasant party. Faced by such facts would Vintila Bratiano bend now or break later? The peasants munched their rations, waited patiently.