'Military report on Tehran and adjacent Provinces of North-West Persia (including the Caspian Littoral)' [‎118v] (241/610)

Foreign Inter
vention and
Foreign Offi
cials for
assistance in
administration.
of them function. Each department has its separate staff,
but there is no organized civil service and nomination and
advancement of departmental officials fall to the minister
concerned, who makes advantageous use of his power of pat
ronage. Salaries for officials were introduced by the second
Mailis, but they are quite inadequate; employment is uncertain
and an ex-official awaiting appointment to a fresh post is not
paid during the interim.
The offices are over-staffed with greedy underworked offi
cials and although peculation may not be practiced so openly
or on such a grand scale as during the despotism, participants
in it are more numerous and the administration remains corrupt
and rotten.
External conditions have been unfavourable to the success
of the constitutional regime, Russia was opposed to it and
foreign armies trespassed and fought on Persian territory from
1914 onwards, but in any case confusion was the inevitable
result of the sudden transition from an Oriental bureaucratic
to a Western democratic form of government for which the
country was not ripe. The peasantry, who under the system
of universal suffrage, constitute numerically the greater part
of the electorate, are illiterate and have no conception of poli
tical issues, members of the Majlis were unversed ^parlia
mentary procedure and undisciplined, and ministers and officials
lack integrity, experience, and practical ability and initiative,
and are quite ignorant of principles of government and too
vain to study them. The most damnatory testimony, however,
of the unfitness of the country for this form of Constitutional
Government was afforded by the non-assembly of the Majlis in
1920 at a time of national crisis, and the disinclination of
members already elected to proceed- to Tehran m order to form
a quorum.
\s a result of the increasing disorder and incompetence, and
of the financial indebtedness of the Persian Government since
1900 Russia and Great Britain became more engaged m the
affairs of Persia, Russia with the deliberate purpose of securing
a preponderant position in Northern Persia adjacent to her
own Empire, and Great Britain from fear of Russian encroach
ments and also because disorder m Southern Persia affected
the frontiers of India.
After the Anglo-Russian Convention concluded in August
1907 and recognized by the Persian Government as a condition
of an advance of £200,000 made by Russia and Great Britain