LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE TURMOIL IN PERSIA.
150 THE EDITOR OF THB °SPECTATOR:1
SIR,—In your article of July 4th under the above heading you say all the Persian people are "of the same blood " ; but this is not so. There are two distinct races in modern Persia,—a ruling minority of Turkish blood and speech and of Mongolian extraction, and a subject majority of Persian or Iranian lineage and speech and partly at least of Aryan descent. The difference is much the same as that between Norman and Saxon in England in the time of the Pla.ntagenets, or between Frank and Gaul in France under the Merovingian Kings; it presents a parallel to the rule of the Manchu Tartars in China, for, like the Manchus, the Persian Turks have adopted the religion, the language, and the culture of the people over whoiii they rule. The Kajar tribe to which the Shah belongs is one of the five Turkish tribes whose confederation founded the modern Persian Monarchy in the fifteenth century. Another of these tribes was the Afshar, to which the famous Nadir Shah belonged ; and after his death the chief rule passed for some time into the hands of the Zends, a native Persian tribe whose Monarchs established their capital at Shiraz, in the South. It is barely a hundred years since the Zends were ousted by the Turkish Kajars from the North. The modern Persians are a mixed race, for their country, lying between the Caspian Sea and the Indian Ocean, has been the highway for the successive migrations of Semitic Arabs from the West, and Mongolian Turks and Tartars from the East. But the quickness of intellect of the original Aryan stock still shows itself in the modern Persians, more especially in those who, like the Parsis of India, have remained Fire-worshippers, and whose religion has debarred them from intermarriage with the Arab or the Turk.I am, Sir, &c.,
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