Glimpses of Modern Persia — 
A FRAGMENT OF OLD PERSIAN MASONRY 
and inevitable racial change. What the 
hordes of Genghis and Timur began, the 
present reigning dynasty of Kadjars, out ot 
the rough Caspian province of Mazanderan, 
has about completed. In the beginning the 
Kadjars were warriors and vandals ; they 
were never artists. The first of them 
inaugurated his reign by obliterating all traces 
of the estheticism of the Sufi and preceding 
rulers. In its stead he and his successors 
have created nothing. In the north of Persia 
the people are Turko-Tartar,—Mongol 
if you please ; only a tinge of the old 
Persian blood remains. And the Turkoman, 
swinging like a pendulum between Kashgar 
and the Bosphorus, has not marked his way 
with monuments of the good, the true or 
the beautiful. Progressing southward, in 
Hamadan, Ispahan, Shiraz, the Turkish 
dialects gradually give way to Persian, the 
manners improve, refinement increases. But 
the poverty is everywhere. Every satrapy 
in the kingdom, South as well as North, has 
to surrender its flesh and blood into the 
hands of some Kadjar princeling or kinsman 
by marriage, in the way of tax. From every 
acre of tillable soil more than half the 
harvest is squeezed to satisfy the official 
Juggernaut. The money thus wrung from 
them flows in a ceaseless stream, each great 
or petty official taking his “ bit” as it goes 
to the capital. Here is wealth, real wealth ; 
here is display ; here is superficial beauty 
begot in extravagance ; here is improvidence 
which seems to forget to-morrow. Thus 
is Persia made poor and ever poorer. 
Already it is a debtor nation, shorn of 
territory, and mortgaged to the eyes, but how 
much of riches is hidden in the Imperial 
secret coffers no man knows—certainly the 
hoardings of centuries. Some egregious 
claims, set at a figure which it was thought 
would make the country bond-slave for 
decades, have been met with ease and serenity 
after a little visit to the treasure chambers. 
But it is the exactions of the present that 
are used to beautify Teheran ; and in a wav 
it is beautiful. In pictures, the Persian build¬ 
ings, erected a century or more ago, with 
their plenteous stucco work and ornamental 
brick and mirror glass, with their graceful 
mingling of old Iranian and Arabic with 
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