surrounding counties. He would not run again until 1905, after the PNR had abandoned the strategy of political passivism. The Transylvanian Memorandum At the 1887 national conference of the PNR the participants voiced their grievances in regard to the worsening situation of the ethnic Romanians in the Kingdom of Hungary and decided to present the Emperor a petition encompassing the growing complaints against the consequences of the Ausgleich: the discrimination and the Magyarization process conducted against the ethnic Romanians, their underrepresentation in the Hungarian Parliament through the electoral laws despite their demographic majority in Transylvania and the way the Ausgleich was adopted, without consulting the Transylvanians. Nevertheless, at the next national conference (1890) it was decided to postpone this endeavor to a later, more convenient date. As a result of this decision, in November 1891, Pop de Băsești asked for the resignation of the PNR president Vincențiu Babeș and argued that the leadership of PNR should be taken over "by an appeasing person, with a calm temperament and above all totally independent and master of his own ideas and beliefs". Heeding his call, the delegates of the PNR elected in 1892 as president and Pop de Băsești as vice president of the PNR. The new leaders decided to task Vasile Lucaciu and Iuliu Coroianu with drafting and publishing the petition. Under the name of "Transylvanian Memorandum", the petition was approved by the PNR on 25 March 1892 and brought on 28 May 1892 to Vienna by 300 delegates of the PNR (among them 48 members from Szilágy County, including Pop de Băsești) to be presented to the Emperor Franz Joseph in a sealed envelope. At the request of the Hungarian government, Franz Joseph did not receive the delegation and forwarded the unopened envelope to the Hungarian Prime-Minister, which in turn forwarded it unopened to the Torda-Aranyos Ispán in order to be returned to the sender, Ioan Rațiu, arguing that the Hungarian Ministry of Interior was not authorized to present the Emperor with petitions of individuals not entitled to represent the ethnic Romanians in Hungary. Met with refusal, PNR published the memorandum in the press. Tensions ran high: Rațiu's home in Torda was damaged by Hungarian demonstrators, leading to protests in Romania. After a while, the government in Budapest gave in to pressure from the Hungarian nationalists and in May 1893 it launched proceedings against the PNR president, Raţiu, the vice