'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎587] (678/748)

BRITISH AND RUSSIAN POLICY IN PERSIA 587
be added that the haughty and truculent soldiery of the Amir look
with unconcealed contempt upon the Persian serbaz, and that the
ranks of Eastern armies do not anywhere provide a more speaking
contrast than the tattered Persian regular and the bearded braggart
who wears the uniform of Abdur Rahman Khan.
Touching the relations of Persia and Turkey, though the two
countries have not been at war for over half a century, and though
the immediate sources of provocation to either are less
Turkey striking or numerous, yet the hereditary enmity of cen
turies still rankles, and it is with keen pleasure that Shah or Sultan
witnesses a rebuff administered to Stambul or to Teheran. It
was this jealousy rather than the reasons alleged to the public that
accounted for the omission of Constantinople from the last European
tour of Nasr-ed-Din. In times past the balance of advantage has
been fairly equalised. If Persian forces have held Baghdad, Turkish
armies have stormed and captured Tabriz. The Treaty of Erzerum,
concluded in 1847, is the basis of the existing peace between
the two countries ; but the indeterminate state of the long Turco-
Persian frontier from Mount Ararat to the Shat-el-Arab is both, as
I have shown, the source of recurrent squabbles, and might at any
time be magnified into a casus belli. The divided jurisdiction over
the Kurds is a further element of trouble, which in the rebellion of
Sheikh Obeidullah in 1884 nearly burst into a flame. In the south
the rising fortunes of Mohammerah are as gall and wormwood to
the Turks of Busrah and Baghdad, and how amiable the interchange
of official civilities between the two powers can be my chapters on
the Karun River and the Persian Gulf The historical term used to describe the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. will have shown. Fortu
nately for peace, neither Persia nor Turkey in Asia is a country
that can afford to fight; and the rivalry between the two powers
seldom gets beyond petty territorial thieving and diplomatic
recrimination.
In turning to the connection of Persia with the policies of
Russia and Great Britain, and more especially of the latter—a
subject which has rarely been absent from my mind's
and Great eye in the composition of this work—I cannot better
emphasise the commanding claim which I conceive it to
possess upon the attention of Englishmen than by quoting the
language employed by Sir H. Rawlinson in the preface to his
statesmanlike essays: —
The political affairs of a second-rate Oriental power like Persia