To administer poor relief in a town like Yezd on anything approaching to a sound system necessitates a great deal of reliance upon native information, and also a certain amount of high-handed dealing. Any food or clothing given must be of a class only acceptable to the very poorest, for otherwise the candidates for relief would be too numerous to deal with in even the roughest fashion. These considerations will explain two things; first of all it will be readily understood that it is much easier to give systematic relief to members of a native community which is more or less down-trodden, such as the Jews or Babis; for although a certain number of mistakes will be made in dealing with these peoples, they will be much less resented, and will militate much less against the success of the whole effort. Secondly, it will be obvious that such relief will not call forth very much gratitude from the recipients. The very fact of investigation gives the idea to the Persian mind that charity is given grudgingly. Also it is impossible to handle a hundred screaming women in a small compound without a certain amount of what appears to be stern dealing, and after all in most instances the relief given is not as much as we ourselves would like it to be. Added to this, most of the people receiving relief are under the impression that we are simply dispensing a small part of the large supplies sent to us for the purpose from abroad; and the Jews, of whom nearly a hundred families were receiving relief in Yezd last winter, believed that all that was given to them came from their co-religionists in Europe. The Babis of course looked upon the matter rather differently, but people who hold the theory of _savabs_ in the way in which Persians do, have always a feeling that anything given to them means one for them and two for the giver. At the same time Persians who are interested in Christianity, and who are not themselves candidates for poor relief, see a great deal more in the system than do those who are more intimately concerned with it. They often understand that the willingness to take trouble in localising need, and the absolute recklessness with which we incur as many curses as blessings in the performance of our work, points to an utterly different ideal from that which is accepted in Islam; and whether they are prepared to approve it or not, anything which shows the native part of the fundamental distinction between Islam and Christianity must in the end be of enormous assistance in missionary work.