I accordingly tendered Major Stokes the post of chief of the future Treasury gendarmerie, his services as military attache having come to an end.  After some correspondence with the British Legation, I was informed late in July that the British Foreign Office held that he must resign his commission in the British-Indian army before accepting the post.  This Major Stokes did, by cable, on July 31st, and the matter was regarded as settled.

What was my surprise, therefore, to learn, on the evening of August 8th, that the British Minister, following instructions from his Government, had that day presented a note to the Persian Foreign Office, warning the Persian Government that any attempt to employ Major Stokes in the “northern sphere” of Persia (which included Teheran, the capital) would probably be followed by retaliatory action (sic) by Russia which England would not be in a position to deprecate.  Between individuals, such action would clearly be considered bad faith.  Sir Edward Grey, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, shortly thereafter explained that the appointment of Major Stokes would be a violation of what he termed the “spirit” of the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.  Yet just two weeks before, when he consented to Stokes resigning to accept the post, he had never dreamed of such a thing.

The truth is that the semiofficial St. Petersburg press, like the Novoe Vremya, had begun to bluster about the affair, egged on by the Russian Foreign Office, and Sir Edward Grey was compelled to invent some pretext for his manifest dread of displeasing Britain’s “good friend Russia” about anything.  Hence the birth of that wondrous and fearsome child, that rubber child which could be stretched to cover any and all things, the “spirit of the convention.”  It was a wonderful discovery for the gentlemen of the so-called “forward party” of the Russian Government, since they now beheld not only a new means of evading the plain letter of their agreement, but gleefully found a woful lack of spirit in their partner to the convention, Great Britain.

The British Foreign Office pretended to believe that they had checked Russia’s march to the Gulf; they knew better then, and they know still better now.  There is but one thing on earth that will check that march, and that thing England is apparently not in a geographical or a policial position to furnish in sufficient numbers.  The British public now know this, and unfortunately the “forward party” in Russia knows it, and that is why bearded faces at St. Petersburg crack open and emit rumbles of genuine merriment every time Sir Edward Grey stands up in the House of Commons and explains to his countrymen that he has most ample and categorical assurances from Russia that her sole purpose in sending two or three armies into Persia is to show her displeasure with an American finance official.

For that same reason, doubtless, she has recently massacred some hundreds of Persians in Tabriz, Enzeli, and Resht, and has hanged numbers of Islamic priests, provincial officials, and constitutionalists whom she classifies as the “dregs of revolution.”  That is why the Russian flag was hoisted over the government buildings at Tabriz, the capital of the richest province of the empire, while a Russian military governor dispensed justice at the bayonet-point and with the noose.