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The vain and despotic Nasiri'd- Din Shah, denounced by Baha'u'llah as the "Prince of Oppressors"; of whom He had written that he would soon be made "an object- lesson for the world"; whose reign was stained by the execution of the Bab and the imprisonment of Baha'u'llah; who had persistently instigated his subsequent banishments to Constantinople, Adrianople and Akka; who, in collusion with a vicious sacerdotal order, had vowed to strangle the Faith in its cradle, was dramatically assassinated, in the shrine of Shah Abdu'l- 'Azim, on the very eve of his jubilee, which, as ushering in a new era, was to have been celebrated with the most elaborate magnificence, and was to go down in history as the greatest day in the annals of the Persian nation. The fortunes of his house thereafter steadily declined, and finally through the scandalous misconduct of the dissipated and irresponsible Ahmad Shah, led to the eclipse and disappearance of the Qajar dynasty. (225:2) Napoleon III, the foremost monarch of his day in the West, excessively ambitious, inordinately proud, tricky and superficial, who is reported to have contemptuously flung down the Tablet sent to him by Baha'u'llah, who was tested by Him and found wanting, and whose downfall was explicitly predicted in a subsequent Tablet, was ignominiously defeated in the Battle of Sedan (1870), marking the greatest military capitulation recorded in modern history; lost his kingdom and spent the remaining years of his life in exile. His hopes were utterly blasted, his only son, the Prince Imperial, was killed in the Zulu War, his much vaunted empire collapsed, a civil war ensued more ferocious than the Franco- German war itself, and William I, the Prussian king, was hailed emperor of a unified Germany in the Palace of Versailles.
(225:3)
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