or the equally familiar verse:
ستاند زبان از رقیبان راز، كه تا راز سلطان نگویند باز،
(
Arabic characters)
Lest they should repeat the secret of the King.”
That I have not myself been privileged to witness the events here described is, I readily admit, a serious disqualification. But, on the other hand, I have seen and conversed with not a few of the principal actors in these events, while many correspondents in Persia, both Persians and Europeans, friends and strangers, knowing the intensity of my interest in all that touches Persia’s welfare, have been kind enough to communicate to me a mass of information, out of which, in addition to what has been published in Blue Books and White Books and in the Persian and European newspapers, I have endeavoured to construct a coherent, and, I trust, a critical narrative. And inasmuch as from my eighteenth year onwards, that is for thirty years, hardly a day has passed on which I have not read, written or spoken Persian, striving always to penetrate further into the spirit of the language and the mind of the people of Persia, it is possible that I may have entered more fully into their thoughts, hopes and ideals than many foreigners who have spent a much longer time in the country than myself. Moreover the publication of this book will certainly elicit information which would otherwise remain hidden and eventually be lost, just as the publication in January, 1909, of my Short Account of Recent Events in Persia led directly to the publication of the excellent “History of the Awakening of the Persians’ (Ta’ríkh-i-Bídáriy-i-Írániyán) which I have so often had occasion to cite in these pages.
The system of transliteration of Persian names and words adopted in this book is essentially the same as that which I have employed in previous works, but I have been more consistent (some of my critics will, no doubt, say “more pedantic”) in its application than heretofore. Persian phonetics are very simple—simpler than Arabic, where the hard or “coarse” consonants modify the vowel-sounds, and much simpler than Turkish—and there is no occasion to complicate them by
