But it is not only, nor principally, of climate that one speaks in Persia at the present time.

Persia has been stirring, if not with great events, at least with important ones, and at the risk of telling stale news, one must take a glance at the recent history of the country and its people.  It is proverbial to say that Persia has been misgoverned for years.  It is a country and the Persians are people who seem fated by circumstances and by temperament to endure ill-government.  A ruler is either a despot or a knave, and frequently both.  Any system of policy is liable to change at any moment.  Property is held in the uneasy tenure of those who have stolen it, and a long string of names of rulers and politicians reveals the fact that most of them have made what they could for themselves by any means, and that perhaps, on the whole, violence has been less detrimental to the country than weakness.

[Page Heading:  THE YOUNG PERSIAN MOVEMENT]

The worst of it is that no one seems particularly to want the Deliverer—­the great and single-minded leader who might free and uplift the country.  Persia does not crave the ideal ruler; he might make it very unpleasant for those who are content and rich in their own way.  It is this thing, amongst many others, which helps to make the situation in Persia not only difficult but almost impossible to follow or describe, and it is, above all, the temperament of the Persians themselves which is the baffling thing in the way of Persian reform.  Yet reform has been spoken of loudly, and again and again in the last few years, and the reformation is generally known as the Nationalist or Young Persian Movement.  To follow this Movement through its various ramifications would require a clue as plain and as clear as a golden thread, and the best we can do in our present obscurity is to give a few of the leading features.

The important and critical situation evident in Persia to-day owes its beginning to the disturbances in 1909, when the Constitutional Party came into power, forcibly, and with guns ready to train on Tehran, and when, almost without an effort, they obtained their rights, and lost them again with even less effort....

* * * * *

29 February.—­The last day of a long month.  The snow falls without ceasing, blotting out everything that there may be to be seen.  To-day, for the first time, I realised that there are hills near.  Mr. Lightfoot and I walked to the old stone lion which marks the gateway of Ekmadan—­i.e., ancient Hamadan.  I think the snow was rather thicker than usual to-day.  Mr. Lightfoot and I went to Hamadan, plodding our way through little tramped-down paths, with snow three feet deep on either side.  By way of being cheerful we went to see two tombs.  One was an old, old place, where slept “the first great physician” who ever lived.  In it a dervish kept watch in the bitter cold, and some slabs of dung kept a smouldering fire not burning but smoking.  These dervishes have been carrying messages for Germans.  Mysterious, like all religious men, they travel through the country and distribute their whispers and messages.  The other tomb is called Queen Esther’s, though why they should bury her at Ekmadan when she lived down at Shushan I don’t know.