"Tender But Lovely Hope"

"Rumania stands. . . . Rumania, the country I love and have to live for, stands and stands! ... I am the link with the past--the one still on guard. . . . Rumania and I are one. No joys, no griefs can come to Rumania that are not mine!"

She who gave utterance to these lines was, of course, the Dowager Queen Marie of Rumania. Last week, she and her daughter-in-law, Princess Helen, mother of Baby King Mihai, jointly received in audience the new Peasant Prime Minister of Rumania, Juliu Maniu -- he who has just overthrown the corrupt, oligarchical gov ernment of onetime Prime Minister Vintila Bratiano (TIME, Nov. 12 et seq.). To the Dowager Queen and the Princess-Mother-of-a-King, Peasant Maniu revealed a truly staggering state of affairs. He declared that upon coming into power, last fortnight, he found in the Royal Treasury a cash balance of exactly three lei (one and four-fifths of a cent). He found a national deficit of nine billion lei ($54,000,000) ; and that advances already made to the State by the National Bank of Rumania greatly exceeded the legal limit. In short, the new Prime Minister charged his predecessors with every sort of gross malfeasance. They had kept on the State payroll, he said, hundreds of persons now dead and some who were never born. Dolefully he admitted that it might prove temporarily impossible to meet the government payroll charges for the current month.

Stern and ominous though the situation seemed, Dowager Queen Marie was not without words of cheer: "Hasn't Rumania a small, bright star on her horizon?--Our little King Mihai, our tender but lovely hope. He is our symbol, and just because we are a young country and because of our struggles and griefs, what sweeter symbol could we have than a little innocent child, around whom one and all, great and small, rich and poor, unite to guide and help and protect--little Mihai, our King."

Even cynics sympathized with Peasant Juliu Maniu as he left the Royal Palace. More than a "tender but lovely hope" is needed to keep his Cabinet afloat with a temporarily unbalancable budget. That could be done by former Prime Minister Vintila Bratiano because he had behind him the great fiscal tycoons of Rumania. The new peasant Cabinet must not only worry through without such assistance, but must wage next month a national Parliamentary campaign. Even best wishers of Prime Minister Maniu were forced to admit, last week, that his little Ship of State is tossed on perilous seas.