lled 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.

Filled with the desire to perform its task, the Medjlis, or national
parliament, had voted in the latter part of 1910 to obtain the services
of five American experts to undertake the work of reorganizing Persia's
finances. They applied to the American Government, and through the good
offices of our State Department, their legation at Washington was
placed in communication with men who were considered suitable for the
task. The intervention of the State Department went no further than
this, and the Persian Government, like the men finally selected, was
told that the nomination by the American Government of suitable
financial administrators indicated a mere friendly desire to aid and
was of no political significance whatsoever.

The Persians had already tried Belgian and French functionaries and had
seen them rapidly become mere Russian political agents or, at best,
seen them lapse into a state of _dolce far niente_. Poor Persia had
been sold out so many times in the framing of tariffs and tax laws, in
loan transactions and concessions of various kinds that the nationalist
government had grown desperate and certainly most distrustful of all
foreigners coming