The end of so shameful a reign was but the beginning of a new era which, however auspiciously hailed at first, was destined to witness the collapse of the Ottoman ramshackle and worm-eaten state. Muḥammad V, a brother of ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd II, an absolute nonentity, failed to improve the status of his subjects. The follies of his government ultimately sealed the doom of the empire. The War of 1914–18 provided the occasion. Military reverses brought to a head the forces that were sapping its foundations. While the war was still being fought the defection of the Sherif of Mecca and the revolt of the Arabian provinces portended the convulsion which was to seize the Turkish throne. The precipitate flight and complete destruction of the army of Jamál Pá_sh_á, the commander-in-chief in Syria—he who had sworn to raze to the ground, after his triumphant return from Egypt, the Tomb of Bahá’u’lláh, and to publicly crucify the Center of His Covenant in a public square of Constantinople—was the signal for the nemesis that was to overtake an empire in distress. Nine-tenths of the large Turkish armies had melted away. A fourth of the whole population had perished from war, disease, famine and massacre. A new ruler, Muḥammad VI, the last of the twenty-five successive degenerate sulṭáns, had meanwhile succeeded his wretched brother. The edifice of the empire was now quaking and tottering to its fall. Muṣṭafá Kamál dealt it the final blows. Turkey, that had already shrunk to a small Asiatic state, became a republic. The sulṭán was deposed, the Ottoman Sultanate was ended, a rulership that had remained unbroken for six and a half centuries was extinguished. An empire which had stretched from the center of Hungary to the Persian Gulf and the Sudan, and from the Caspian Sea to Oran in Africa, had now dwindled to a small Asiatic republic. Constantinople itself, which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been honored as the splendid metropolis of the Roman Empire, and had been made the capital of the Ottoman government, was abandoned by its conquerors, and stripped of its pomp and glory—a mute reminder of the base tyranny that had for so long stained its throne. Such, in their bare outline, were the awful evidences of that retributive justice which so tragically afflicted ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz, his successors, his throne and his dynasty. What of Náṣiri’d-Dín _Sh_áh, the other partner in that imperial conspiracy which sought to extirpate, root and branch, the budding Faith of God? His reaction to the Divine Message borne to him by the fearless Badí, the “Pride of Martyrs,” who had spontaneously dedicated himself to this purpose, was characteristic of that implacable hatred which, throughout his reign, glowed so fiercely in his breast. DIVINE RETRIBUTION ON THE QÁJÁR DYNASTY