God.’” Several women present joined in the laugh at my wife’s ignorance. Of course a great deal of cruelty goes on in the less respectable Persian households, and the use of poison is not uncommon. It should be explained that in Persia people who are not even professedly respectable are to be found in every class, and in a commercial town like Yezd status goes largely by wealth, and carries with it no obligation to keep up even a superficial reputation. The organisation of the household is very largely outside the operation of the ordinary law. I do not know what is the exact legal limit of the _jus paternum_, but I am quite sure that it is very difficult to bring to book the head of a household for murdering any member of his family. Also in the case of a member of the family leaving Islam, the matter would probably be primarily left to the head of the household, although if the case was flagrant the matter might also be taken up by outsiders. It is very necessary to understand this when discussing the possibility of religious liberty in Persia. Religious liberty, proclaimed by a firman of the Shah, would not have the enormous value which is sometimes supposed. Indeed it would be almost entirely without immediate value, unless the Persian government were considerably strengthened, and a limitation put on the _jus paternum_. A decision by leading _mujtahids_ that it was expedient to give such liberty either to the individual or to the family, would probably have more immediate effect, but, even were such a thing possible, it would be difficult to say how long such a decision would remain unchanged if advantage was really taken of it, and the precedent of the decision would on the whole be rather a bad one. Another conceivable form of religious liberty is that the right of making converts from Islam should be secured by treaty to the European missionary. This, however, would not put a stop to the persecution of converts. There is so much injustice that is done in Persia as a matter of course, that it would be very difficult to prove that Persian subjects who were converts had been interfered with for religious reasons. One of the difficulties that missionaries experience at present, is that converts are always bringing forward instances of injustice which they themselves believe to be due to their profession of Christianity, whereas the missionary, who has considerable doubts on the subject, is often afraid of calling down real persecution by using his influence on their behalf.