does, the fact is to be attributed to moral causes.” Their soldiers he describes (p. 24) as “remarkably hardy, patient and enduring, requiring scarcely any baggage, and able to march thirty miles a day for many successive days, while living on nothing but bread and onions.” “No troops in the world,” he says in another place (p. 200), “it may be safely asserted, are capable of so much continued endurance of fatigue as are the veteran soldiers of Persia.” So again (p. 218), in speaking of the defeat of the Persians by the Russians at the battle of Ganja in 1826, he says, “Could the Sháh have convinced himself of the fact that in his hardy and obedient subjects he possessed the material for an army capable at any time of defending his dominions against invaders, provided that his troops should be properly drilled, the lesson would have been cheaply paid for by the disaster of Ganja.” Again (p. 283), he describes “a forced march which only Persian troops could accomplish,” in which (in 1835) they traversed a distance of eighty miles in little more than thirty hours. And once more (on p. 387) he asserts that “Persian soldiers are beyond comparison the most hardy, enduring and patient troops in the world,” and adds that “had the administration of the Amír-i-Niẓám (Mírzá Taqí Khán) been prolonged, the King of Persia would have been the master of an army of one hundred thousand men, regularly drilled and accoutred.” And in describing the battle of Muḥammara (March 26, 1857), when the Persians were defeated by the English, he says (p. 451):—“The Persian artillery and the troops in the batteries had acted as well as they could have been expected to behave; they had served their guns well, and had not shrunk from exposure and labour.”
But it is not in the conscript soldiers of a despotic Sháh that we must look for the highest manifestations of Persian courage. It is when the Persian is inspired by that enthusiasm for a person, a doctrine or a cause of which he is so susceptible that his heroism becomes transcendental. If the Bábís have done nothing else, they have at least shewn how Persians, when exalted by enthusiasm, can meet death and the most horrible tortures imaginable, not merely with stoicism but with ecstasy. Every student of their history, from Gobineau, Kazim
