st the annals of
the reigns of the later Qajars are marked by the stagnation of the nation,
the illiteracy of the people, the corruption and incompetence of the
government, the scandalous intrigues of the court, the decadence of the
princes, the irresponsibility and extravagance of the sovereign, and his
abject subservience to a notoriously degraded clerical order.

The successor of Aqa Muhammad _Kh_an, the uxorious, philoprogenetive
Fath-'Ali _Sh_ah, the so-called "Darius of the Age," was a vain, an
arrogant, and unscrupulous miser, notorious for the enormous number of his
wives and concubines, numbering above a thousand, his incalculable
progeny, and the disasters which his rule brought upon his country. He it
was who commanded that his vizir, to whom he owed his throne, be cast into
a caldron of boiling oil. As to his successor, the bigoted Muhammad
_Sh_ah, one of his earliest acts, definitely condemned by the pen of
Baha'u'llah, was the order to strangle his first minister, the illustrious
Qa'im-Maqam, immortalized by that same pen as the "Prince of the City of
Statesmanship and Literary Accomplishment," and to have him replaced by
that lowbred, consummate scoundrel, Haji Mirza Aqasi, who brought the
country to the verge of bankruptcy and revolution. It was this same _Sh_ah
who refused to interview the Bab and imprisoned Him in A_dh_irbayjan, and
who, at the age of forty, was afflicted by a complication of maladies to
which he succumbed, hastening the doom forecast in these words of the
Qayyum-i-Asma: "I swear by God, O _Sh_ah! If thou showest enmity unto Him
Who is His Remembrance, God will, on the Day of Resurrection, condemn
thee, before the kings, unto hellfire, and thou shalt not, in very truth,
find on that day any helper except God, the Exalted."

Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, a selfish, capricious, imperious monarch, succeeded
to the throne, and, for half a century, was destined to remain the sole
arbiter of the fortunes of his hapless country. A disastrous obscurantism,
a chaotic administration in the provinces, the disorganization of the
finances of the realm, the intrigues, the vindictiveness, and profligacy
of the pampered and greedy courtiers, who buzzed and swarmed round his
throne, his own despotism which, but for the restraining fear of European
public opinion and the desire to be thought well of in the capitals of the
West, would have been more cruel and savage, were the distinguishing
features of the bloody