Some of the people, who did not share the noble view of the Democrats that the poor should starve rather than that cornered wheat should be released, went to the telegraph office with the intention of informing the weak and incapable Teheran Government of the true state of affairs. But the Democrats would have none of that; it might upset their carefully laid schemes for enrichment at the expense of the flesh and blood of their fellows. There was no telling what effect a telegraphed protest might have upon the supineness of the Shah's Cabinet Ministers. Those administrative sluggards might be goaded into some action bordering on interference with the policy of the Hamadan Democrats, which Heaven forbid! So Democrat emissaries picketed the Persian telegraph office, and pitched into the street any of their adversaries who {120} questioned their right to impose an arbitrary censorship. Thus was made manifest the "benign rule" of the "friends of Persia" in all its callous disregard for the first principles of humanity. On the following day there was the sequel to the case of child murder by mother and daughter, when these two unfortunates paid the cruel penalty imposed by Persian law for killing one's own offspring--that of being stoned to death. The "execution" took place in front of the Hamadan telegraph office. The condemned women, already on the borderland of death from hunger, were staked down in two shallow pits near where heavy stones were plentiful. Then the police, reinforced by a willing mob, armed themselves with heavy boulders and pounded the flickering life out of their emaciated frames, silencing for ever their unavailing cries for pity and mercy. It was a revolting spectacle, and although their crime was an abominable one, no one not a Persian could repress a feeling of compassion for the wretched creatures who, made desperate by hunger, had become so dead to all human instinct as to kill and be prepared to eat their own flesh and blood. Other women were apprehended and executed for child murder. It was reported that there was plenty of wheat stored in private houses, and it was urged that severe measures should be taken against the hoarders. The men were still eating their evening meal of grass, flavoured with a little salt. One of the favourite trysting-places of the Democrat {121} stalwarts was the football-ground near the Hospital Compound. Nearly every afternoon in fine weather, when the ground was not being used for play, they sat there cross-legged--in their brown and black loose-fitting robes, resembling so many clucking hens on a roost--discussing and planning the overthrow of the British, while hundreds of their own people lay dying around them of starvation.