thawed condition, while a pipe consoles him for his little trade and the
horrible weather. Before him, in the narrow alleys of the bazaar,
Persians walk with their umbrellas unfurled, and Russians have put the
convenient bashluk (a sort of woollen hood) over their heads and ears.
The Arab, in his long camel-skin coat, looks impervious to the weather,
and women with veiled faces and long black cloaks pick their way through
the mire. Throngs of donkeys, melancholy and overladen, their small feet
sinking in the slush, may be with the foot-passengers. Some pariah dogs
make a dirty patch in the snow, and a troop of Cossacks, their long
cloaks spotted with huge snow-flakes, trot heavily through the narrow
lanes.

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