As Shi’a, these refugees, to put it but mildly, lack sympathy with any movement of the Sunni Turks, and having seen repeated in the election and the arrangement of the Turkish “Mejliss” several of the errors which contributed to the discord and downfall of the first Persian Parliament, were disposed to look on with supercilious superiority at the efforts of a nation which they ever regarded as rather barbarian. Besides which, bad as Persia was under the old regime, the lot of the peasant and the humbler town-dweller was never so bad as was that of the equivalent classes in Turkey; and if there are degrees in the perfection of corruption arrived at by the administrative powers of both empires, there are few experienced Turks and Persians who will not give the palm for completeness in this art to Turkey, at any rate in her Asiatic provinces. So the Persians, looking on, seeing all the difficulties to be surmounted, difficulties complicated by the turbulent and treacherous temperament of Greek and Armenian, waited to see an eventful crisis, and when it came as they had predicted, the triumphant attitude of “I told you so,” for which they had prepared themselves, was intensified by the feeling of having also scored off an old enemy. The only immediate outcome of the Parliament’s inauguration, so far as it affected the dweller in the city, was to provide a number of newspapers with columns filled with reports of speeches--no whit more or less puerile than those provided by our Parliament for the London papers--and a large increase in drunkenness, particularly among the police. The provinces responded with their own interpretation of “Hurriat” by lawlessness of every description, which increased to a point almost unknown in Turkish history, at least in the Asiatic provinces, with which alone this book is concerned. After all, it was a faithful enough repetition of Persia in early 1907, when the dying Muzaffar ud Din Shah granted the first Persian Constitution. In that unfortunate country the ignorant mass looked to the Majlis to produce, within a few days, a panacea for the ills that had grown up and become an integral part of the nation during centuries of misrule, and the failure of the people’s representatives even to adjust minor matters resulted in the outbursts all over the country which eventually, fanned by Muhammad Ali Shah, enabled him to regain his absolute power for a time.