This question reflects the worry of thousands of low‐income people such as Mr. Mousavi, a street cleaner, that the new constitution may be a mere document of words and that meaningful changes for economic betterment of this country's poor population may be slow in coming.

While Mr. Mousavi, his wife, Kobraa, and his brother, Sayed Abdollah Mousavi, voted affirmatively today in the referendum, they did so not because of any great certainty that by casting their votes they were insuring the rapid arrival of a better life.

Rather, their vote was an affirmation of their trust in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's spiritual leader, who strongly appealed to this nation's 35 million people to show up in large numbers yesterday and today to support the new constitution, which is expected to usher in a radical political system based on Islamic principles.

Lure of a Better Way of Life

It was among people like Mr. Mousavi that expectations from this new constitution are highest. The stocky, intense native of Luristan Province came to Teheran a decade ago. He was drawn to the capital by Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi's promises and programs of modernization — only to find that the financial benefits of such modernization accrued to a relatively few people, that his own traditional ways had no place in Teheran and that it was too late to go back to the village he had abandoned.

So cities such as Halabi‐Abad sprang up in and around Teheran, makeshift homes for the poor and the struggling peasants that soon became permanent features, enclaves of ugliness near wealth and ostentation. More than 600 families live in the City of Tin, in homes whose outer walls are built of flattened cooking‐oil cans and the interiors of mud.