The second picture is eight months later, almost to the day.  On January 11, 1912, I stood in a circle of gloomy American and Persian friends in front of the Atabak palace where we had been living, about to step into the automobile that was to bear us back over the same road to Enzeli.  The mountains behind Teheran were white with snow, the sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky, there was life-tonic in the air, but none in our hearts, for our work in Persia, hardly begun, had come to a sudden end.

Between the two dates some things had happened—­things that may be written down, but will probably never be undone—­and the hopes of a patient, long-exploited people of reclaiming their position in the world had been stamped out ruthlessly and unjustly by the armies of a so-called Christian and civilized nation.

Prior to 1906, the masses of the Persians had suffered in comparative silence from the ever-growing tyranny and betrayal of successive despots, the last of whom, Muhammad Ali Shah, a vice-sodden monster of the most perverted type, openly avowed himself the tool of Russia.  The people, finally stung to a blind desperation and exhorted by their priests, rose in the summer of 1906, and by purely passive measures—­such as taking sanctuary, or bast, in large numbers in sacred places and in the grounds of the British Legation at Teheran—­succeeded in obtaining from Muzaffarn’d Din Shah, the father of Muhammad Ali, a constitution which he granted some six months before his death.

The pledge given in this document his son and successor swore to fulfil and then violated a dozen or more times, until the long-suffering constitutionalists, who called themselves “nationalists,” finally compelled him, despite the intrigues and armed resistance of Russian agents and officers, to abdicate in favor of his young son, Sultan Ahmad Shah, the present constitutional monarch.  This was in July, 1909.

It was this constitutional government, recognized as sovereign by the Powers, that had determined to set its house in order, and in practise to replace absolute monarchy with something approaching democracy.  Whence the Persians, a strictly Oriental people, had derived their strange confidence in the potency of a democratic form of government to mitigate or cure their ills, no one can say.  We might ask the Hindus of India, or the “Young Turks,” or to-day the “Young Chinese” the same question.  The fact is that the past ten years have witnessed a truly marvelous transformation in the ideas of Oriental peoples, and the East, in its capacity to assimilate Western theories of government, and in its willingness to fight for them against everything that tradition makes sacred, has of late years shown a phase heretofore almost unknown.

Persia has given a most perfect example of this struggle toward democracy, and, considering the odds against the nationalist element, the results accomplished have been little short of amazing.