Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/659

KATIONAL CHARACTER. 1 PERSIA 629 Uional aracter men, and develop their military instincts, a fine working army, very superior to anything that Turkey could produce, might be obtained in a very short period of time." It is difficult to rely on statistics in the present case, but the following are found in the latest and most trustworthy records. 1 " The Persian army, according to official returns of the minister of war, numbers 105,500 men, of whom 5000 form the artillery, 53,900 the infantry, 31,000 the cavalry, regular and irregular, and 7200 militia. Of these troops, however, only one-third are em ployed in active service, the standing army of Persia consisting, on the peace footing, of a total of 30,000 men. By a decree of the Shah, issued in July 1875, it was ordered that the army should for the future be raised by conscription, instead of by irregular levies, and that a term of service of twelve years should be substi tuted for the old system, under which the mass of the soldiers were retained for life ; but the decree has not been enforced to any ex tent. The organization of the army is by provinces, tribes, and dis tricts. A province furnishes several regiments ; a tribe gives one, and sometimes two, and a district contributes one battalion to the army. The commanding officers are almost invariably selected from the chiefs of the tribe or district from which the regiment is raised. The Christians, Jews, and Guebres in Persia are exempt from all military service. In recent years the army has been under the training and organization of European officers." Revenue. According to the Statesman s Year Book for 1884 the revenue and expenditure of the Government are known only from estimates. If we accept these as based on consular reports, the total receipts of the Government amounted, on the average of the years 1872 to 1875, to 1,900,000 per annum, while the expendi ture during the same period was at the rate of 1,756,000 per annum. The receipts of the year 1882 amounted to 1,600,000 in money, besides 280,000 in kind, consisting of barley, wheat, rice, and silk, making the total revenue equal to 1,880,000; and of this sum 1,520,000 came from direct taxes and 353,600 from customs. The expenditure amounted to 1,800,000, of which 760,000 was for the army ; 360,000 for the regal court ; the priest hood, &c., 240,000; foreign affairs, 28,000; other departments, 60,000; education, 12,000. The surplus is paid into the shah s treasury. About one-fourth of the receipts are constituted by pay ments in kind, mostly reserved for the use of the army and the shah s own household. The whole revenue is raised by assessments upon towns, villages, and districts, each of which has to contribute a fixed sum, the amount of which is changed from time to time by tax - assessors appointed by the Government. Almost the entire burthen of taxation falls upon the labouring classes, and among these upon the Muhammadan subjects of the shah. The amount of revenue collected from the Christian population, the Jews, and the Gabars is reported to be very small. The Government has no public debt. The Almanack de Gotha adds to the above items of expenditure in 1882 the sum of 80,000 for the priesthood, &c. In 1868 the revenue demanded from each province, under the divisions then made, was : Adarbaijan, 248,000 ; Gilan, 176,000 ; Ispahan, 168,000; Fars, 152,000; Khurasan, &c., 88,000; Arabistan, 86,000 ; Tehran, &c., 84,000 ; Karman, 84,000 ; Karmanshah, &c., 80,000 ; Khamsah, 72,000; Yazd, 68,000; Mazandaran, 44,000 ; Kazvin, 28,000 ; Kashan, 28,000 ; Biirii- jird, 24,000 ; Gulpaigan, 24,000 ; Kurdistan, 20,000 ; Ramadan, 12,000; Astrabad, 10,000; Kum, 6000; total, 1,502,000. The customs were 214,664, and the value of income received in kind was 220,336, making a total revenue of 1,937,000, or something less than two millions. A prince-royal appointed to a province is often little more than a nominal ruler. On the other hand, some governors, such as Muhammad Isma il Khan, the late wakilu 1-mulk of Karman, attend to even the minute details of administration, and pay especial attention to the collection of revenue. It is not always an easy matter to pay into the royal treasury the sum insisted on, or even voluntarily offered for the government of a province. National Character. Malcolm s Sketches and Morier s Ilajji . Baba are still, after more than half a century, unsuperseded as standard records of accurate information on the manners and customs of an Oriental people. A clever volume 2 published in 1883, which is also worth quoting, contains, among many other faithful delineations, the following. The character of the Persian is that of an easy-going man with a wish to make things pleasant generally. He is hospitable, obliging, and specially well disposed to the foreigner. His home virtues are many : he is very kind and indulgent to his children, and, as a son, his respect for both parents is excessive, developed in a greater degree to his father, in whose presence he will rarely sit, and whom he is in the habit of addressing and speaking of as master. The full stream of his love and reverence is reserved for his mother ; he never leaves her to starve, and her wishes are laws to him. The mother is always the most important member of the household, and the grandmother is treated with veneration. The 1 Statesman s Year Bonk, 1884, pp. 790, 797. 2 Wills, In the Land of the Lion and Sun, 1SS3. presence of the mother-in-law is coveted by their sons-in-law, who look on them as the guardians of the virtue of their wives. The paternal uncle is a much nearer tie than with us ; while men look on their first cousins on the father s side as their most natural wives. " Black slaves and men-nurses or lallaks are much respected ; the dyah or wet nurse is looked on as a second mother and usu ally provided for for life. Persians are very kind to their servants ; a master will often be addressed by his servant as his father, and the servant will protect his master s property as he would his own. A servant is invariably spoken to as bacha (child). The servants expect that their master will never allow them to be wronged. The slaves in Persia have a good time ; well fed, well clothed, treated as spoiled children, given the lightest work, and often given in marriage to a favourite son or taken as segah or con cubine by the master himself, slaves have the certainty of a well- cared-for old age. They are looked on as confidential servants, are entrusted with large sums of money, and the conduct of the most important affairs ; and seldom abuse their trust. The greatest punishment to an untrustworthy slave is to give him his liberty and let him earn his living. They vary in colour and value : the Habshi or Abyssinian is the most valued ; the Suhali or Somali, next in blackness, is next in price ; the Bombassi, or coal-black negro of the interior, being of much less price, and usually only used as a cook. The prices of slaves in Shiraz are, a good Habshi girl of twelve to fourteen 40, a good Somali same age, half as much ; while a Bombassi is to be got for 14, being chosen merely for physical strength. They are never sold, save on importation, though at times they are given away. ... I have never seen a Persian unkind to his own horse or his slave, and when overtaken by poverty he will first sell his shirt, then his slave. "In commercial morality, a Persian merchant will compare not unfavourably with the European generally. ... To the poor, Persians are unostentatiously generous ; most of the rich have regular pensioners, old servants, or poor relations who live on their bounty ; and though there are no workhouses, there are in ordinary times no deaths from starvation ; and charity, though not organized, is general. . . . Procrastination is the attribute of all Persians, to-morrow being ever the answer to any proposition, and the to-morrow means indefinite delay. A great dislike is shown gener ally to a written contract binding the parties to a fixed date ; and, as a rule, on breaking it the Persian always appeals for and expects delay and indefinite days of grace. . . . "Persians are clean in their persons, washing themselves and their garments frequently. The Persian always makes the best of his appearance ; he is very neat in his dress, and is particular as to the sit of his hat and the cut of his coat. All Persians are fond of animals, and do not treat them badly when their own property. " Cruelty is not a Persian vice ; torture and punishments of an unusual and painful nature being part of their judicial system. There are no vindictive punishments, such as a solitary confinement, penal servitude for long terms of years, &c. Seldom, indeed, is a man imprisoned more than twelve months, the rule being that there is a general jail delivery at the ISTew Year. Royal clemency is frequently shown, often, perhaps, with want of judgment." The close adherence to ceremony and etiquette, the ready adaptation to foreign habits, together with the capacity for using and love of receiving the grossest forms of flattery which in the days of Herodotus were found to be notable features of the national character are still to be seen in the 19th century. Morier, in his Second Journey through Persia, relates how on arrival at Bombay his fellow-traveller, the Persian ambassador, returning from a mission to the court of St James s, would not call at Government House until the governor had visited him, on the plea that, when in London, the chairman and deputy-chairman, whom he styled the father and grandfather, of the East India Company, as well as the "viziers" and "grand vizier" himself (Mr Spencer Perceval), had made the first call upon him, clothed, moreover, in the very dress they had worn before their own sove reign ! The present writer, when discussing the necessary conduct of British diplomatists accredited to Persia, said : 3 " In some courts . . . there is a meaning in ridiculous minutiae, the comprehension of which is of vital importance to the envoy and the cause he advocates. ... A chair pushed one inch or two forward or back ward, so as to transgress the border of a particular carpet marked for its limit, may cause serious offence ; a cup of tea, or a tobacco pipe missing from the conventional number offered to a guest, may awake hostile feelings, there may be hidden mischief in a misapplied word of welcome or farewell, in a clumsy gesture, in a new-fashioned article of wearing apparel. Trifles could hardly go further in the way of puerility ; but it is a part of common-sense diplomacy to acknowledge with gravity things which are to all seeming the most opposed to common-sense." Forms of compliment and adulation are in such constant requisi tion with him that a Persian is never at fault to find occasion for their use. If the following example be too characteristic to be s Lecture at the Royal United Service Institution, 26th May 1870.