Mount Athos to Jerusalem and kept up, for the benefit of Greek scholars and pupils, schools which had been built for the sons of the native nobles in Jassy and Bucharest ; who printed, in their capitals and convents, books which were distributed as a work of charity to all the Christians of the East: Greeks, Slavs, Caucasians, Arabs and Syrians. The natural majesty of the Eastern Empire shed its glow upon the Courts on the lower Danube. And by those same capitals, in those same schools, under the guidance of those same ambassadors of Western thought, the ideas of political revolution, of radical reform, of national liberty, were transmitted to all the nations of the European South-East, living before Byzantine influence.
And to-day, too, when any influence has to penetrate to those countries, it must necessarily begin by making its way to Bucarest, the centre of all Roumanian life and activity, the true intellectual capital of South Eastern Europe.
