'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎4] (35/714)

PERSIA
for the dominion of the world. The future of Great Britain,
according to this view, will be decided, not in Europe, not even
upon the seas and oceans which are swept by her flag, or in the
Greater Britain that has been called into existence by her offspring,
but in the continent whence our emigrant stock first came, and
to which as conquerors their descendants have returned. Without
India the British Empire could not exist. The possession of
India is the inalienable badge of sovereignty in the eastern
hemisphere. Since India was known its masters have been lords
of half the world. The impulse that drew an Alexander, a Timur,
and a Baber eastwards to the Indus was the same that in the
sixteenth century gave the Portuguese that brief lease of sovereignty
whose outworn shibboleths they have ever since continued to
mumble; that early in the last century made a Shah of Persia for
ten years the arbiter of the East; that all but gave to France the
empire which stouter hearts and a more propitious star have con
ferred upon our own people; that to this day stirs the ambition
and quickens the pulses of the Colossus of the North. In the in
creasing importance with which domestic politics are invested in
our own public life and in the prevailing tendency to turn west
wards, and to seek both for the examples and the arena of statesman
ship amid younger peoples and a white-skinned race, room may yet
be found for one whose fancy is haunted by ' the ancient of days; '
who reminds his countrymen that, while no longer the arbiters of
the West, they remain the trustees for the East, and are the rulers
of the second largest dark-skinned population in the world ; and
who argues that no safeguard should be omitted by which may be
secured in perpetuity that which is the noblest achievement of the
science of civil rule that mankind has yet bequeathed to man.
W hilst, however, the connection of Persia with the larger
problems of Asiatic politics is the first object which I have had
History v ^ ew 5 a second, scarcely less important, has ever been
Geography bef,ore nie ' and lms gradually swollen in scope and
dimensions, until of itself I would fain believe that it
might justify these volumes. This is a desire to depict Persia as
she now is, apart from her foreign relations; to give a succinct
account of her provinces and peoples, her institutions and features,
her sights and cities, her palaces, temples, and ruins; to trace her
entry, in the present century, and particularly during the last
half-century (a period nearly coterminous with the reign of the