History of the Parsis : including their manners, customs, religion and present position : with coloured and other illustrations : in two volumes

cHap. .] ZVTERVIEWS WITH THE SHAH. 75

been backed up by a system of indefatigable memorialising. On one occasion the Shah was personally interviewed by Mr. Manakji Antaria, under the auspices of Major-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, British ambassador at the Court of Teheran, when the skilful agent introduced the subject with so much tact and good sense that His Majesty’s heart was moved to sympathy, and he ordered a reduction of one hundred tomans from a total claim of nine hundred and twenty tomans, the joint contribution annually wrung from the populations of Yezd and Kerman. Another and still more memorable interview with His Persian Majesty took place during his visit to England in 1873, when the managing committee, ever on the alert, drew up a memorial to him, adorned with gold leaf and inscribed in golden letters, in which were set forth in the most flowery and choicest Persian phrases the poverty and sufferings of their unhappy co-religionists in his country, owing to the “jazia” being still in force, and winding up with the prayer that His Majesty would extend his mercy by abolishing the tax “by way of a propitiatory offermg designed to ward off evil from his most royal person.” ‘This memorial, together with one from the Parsis then resident in England, was presented to the Shah at Buckingham Palace, on the 24th of June 1873, by Messrs. Naorozji Fardunji, Dadabhai Naorozji, Ardeshir Kharshedji Wadia, and Dr. Rastamji Kavasji Bahad-