As told in the preceding volume, Persia in the year 1905 began a struggle for freedom from autocratic rule.  This she finally achieved in decisive fashion and set up a parliamentary government.  Her career of liberty seemed fairly assured.  She had against her, however, an irresistible force.  England and Russia had long been encroaching upon Persian territory.  Russia, in especial, had snatched away province after province in the north.  Of course Persia’s revival would mean that these territorial seizures would be stopped.  Hence Russia almost openly opposed each step in Persia’s progress.  In 1907, Russia and England entered into an agreement by which each, without consulting Persia, recognized that the other held some sort of rights over a part of Persian territory:  a “sphere of Russian influence” was thus established in the north, and of British in the southeast.

The climax to this antagonism against Persia came in 1911.  The desperate Persians appealed to the United States Government to send them an honest administrator to guide them, and President Taft recommended Mr. Shuster for the task.  The work of Mr. Shuster soon won him the enthusiastic confidence and devotion of the Persians themselves.  But in proportion as his reforms seemed more and more to strengthen the parliamentary government and bring hope to Persia, he found himself more and more opposed by the Russian officials.  Finally Russia made his mere presence in the land an excuse for sending her armies to assault the Persians.  Seldom has the murderous attack of a strong country upon a weak one been so open, brazen, and void of all moral justification.  Thousands of Persians were slain by the Russian troops, and many more have since been executed for “rebellion” against the Russian authorities.  The parliamentary government of Persia was completely destroyed; it finally disappeared in tumult and dismay on December 24, 1911.

The country was reduced to helpless submission to the Russian armies.  Mr. Shuster’s own account of the tragedy follows.  He called it “The Strangling of Persia.”

Of the many changing scenes during the eight months of my recent experiences in Persia, two pictures stand out in such sharp contrast as to deserve special mention.

The first is a small party of Americans, of which the writer was one, seated with their families in ancient post-chaises rumbling along the tiresome road from Enzeli, the Persian port on the Caspian Sea, toward Teheran.  It was in the early days of May, 1911, and from these medieval vehicles, drawn by four ratlike ponies, in heat and dust, we gained our first physical impressions of the land where we had come to live for some years—­to mend the broken finances of the descendants of Cyrus and Darius.  We were fired with the ambition to succeed in our work, and, viewed through such eyes, the physical discomforts became unimportant.  Hope sang loud in our hearts as the carriages crawled on through two hundred and twenty miles of alternate mountain and desert scenery.