George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston Quotes

How was it proposed to get rid of the existing majority of Mussulman inhabitants and to introduce the Jews in their place? How many would be willing to return and in what pursuits would they engage? To secure for the Jews already in Palestine equal civil and religious rights seemed to him a better policy than to aim at repatriation on a large scale. He regarded the latter as sentimental idealism, which would never be realised, and that His Majesty's Government should have nothing to do with.

Curzon told the Asiatic Society of Bengal: If there be any one who says to me that there is no duty devolving upon a Christian Government to preserve the monuments of a pagan art, or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue with such a man. Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the sphere of religion, are embraced by the common religion of all mankind.... There is no principle of artistic discrimination between the mausoleum of the despot and the sepulchre of the saint. What is beautiful, what is historic, what tears the mask off the face of the past, and helps us to read its riddles, and to look it in the eyes-these, and not the dogmas of a combative theology, are the principle criteria to which we must look.52

They had heard about the barbarities of the crowbar, and the smoking thatch; but, in his opinion, there were worse barbarities still—namely, those of the loaded gun, the mutilated animals, and the murdered women and men. Irish Members raised a great clamour about the former; but through the latter they sat as silent as stones. Nothing showed more clearly the hollowness of this agitation than the conduct of hon. Members now and their former attitude. In face of this Plan of Campaign, which had been so cleverly organized, was it not permissible that Conservative Members should have their Plan of Campaign also?

Is it legitimate . . . to infer that because the Aryans early spread to the South . . . and extended themselves over the peninsula, they also originally invaded, from some unknown region and conquered India itself? If so, the same argument might be applied to the origin and spread of the Romans, who might be presumed to have invaded Italy from some external unknown region, because they early spread their conquests to the south. . . . But we know from authentic history that the Romans arose from one city and region in Italy: that . . . they gradually extended themselves over and subjugated those territories which subsequently formed one vast empire. (189)

The spectacle of peoples of single race and common traditions existing in a country with clearly defined geographical boundaries, and clinging with successful tenacity to their political existence over long spaces of time, is not an uncommon one in history; but that an Empire like our own, which has over-run the world, which embraces hundreds of races and scores of States, many of which are claiming, and rightly, to be counted as nations themselves—that such an Empire should voluntarily hold together when there is no force to compel it to do so, when the forces that are working in the direction of separation are so strong, when separation itself is so easy—will be an unparalleled and magnificent achievement.
This, then, is the problem which the Victoria League has set itself to solve. You endeavour to do it, not by the agency of material forces, not by laws and regulations, because there is no authority behind you to compel anybody to carry out your behests, but by appealing to that which is the most sacred of all human instincts, namely the family tie, and by preaching the gospel that the real cement of Empire is brotherhood, and that the real basis of brotherhood is mutual understanding.

In far-off lands, amidst alien peoples, in friendless solitudes, under burning suns, your sons, the offspring of your race, will still do good work, work that is good for themselves, good for the country that has sent them out, and good for the community in which they are placed. They will lead clean and healthy lives and have opportunities for doing noble and unselfish deeds. Wherever unknown lands are waiting to be opened up, wherever the secrets or treasures of the earth are waiting to be wrested from her, wherever peoples are lying in backwardness or barbarism, wherever new civilizations are capable of being planted or old civilizations of being revived, wherever ignorance or superstition is rampant, wherever enlightenment and progress are possible, wherever duty and self-sacrifice call—there is, as there has been for hundreds of years, the true summons of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Ever since the great Civil War there has hardly been a rebellion or insurrection in any part of the world of a minority either suffering or fearing oppression which has not been encouraged by members of the Liberal Party in England. They have constituted themselves the international champions of the right of insurrection. They have made us the busybodies, and I suppose foreigners would say the political Pecksniffs, of the world. When Parliament and the Puritans rebelled against the King, when the American Colonies revolted, when the French Revolution broke out—in every case of an insurrectionary movement in the small States of Europe, whether it was Italy, or Greece, or Poland, or Hungary, or to go further afield, Armenia, or the Balkans, or the Sudan, always on the other side we have had sympathy with the minority which was rising against the majority, and we remember one case where a people were actually fighting against us, and we were told that they were persons rightly struggling to be free. Yet when Ulster proposes to do exactly the same thing, simply because it does not fit in with your policy, you accuse them of the wickedness of plunging the country into civil war.

Powerful empires existed and flourished here while Englishmen were still wandering painted in the woods, and when the British Colonies were wilderness and jungle; and India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind than any other terrestrial unit in the universe.

Every, or nearly every, successive religion that has permeated or overswept this country has vindicated its own fervour at the expense of the rival whom it had dethroned. When the Brahmans went to Ellora, they hacked away the features of all the seated Buddhas in the rock-chapels and halls. When Kutub-ud-din commenced, and Altamsh continued, the majestic mosque that flanks the Kutub Minar, it was with the spoil of Hindu temples that they reared the fabric, carefully defacing or besmearing the sculptured Jain images, as they consecrated them to their novel purpose. What part of India did not bear witness to the ruthless vandalism of the great iconoclast Aurungzeb? When we admire his great mosque with its tapering minarets, which are the chief feature of the river front at Benares, how many of us remember that he tore down the holy Hindu temple of Vishveshwar to furnish the material and to supply the site? Nadir Shah during his short Indian inroad effected a greater spoliation than has probably ever been achieved in so brief a space of time. When the Mahratta conquerors overran Northern India, they pitilessly mutilated and wantonly destroyed. When Ranjit Singh built the Golden Temple at Amritsar, he ostentatiously rifled Mohammedan buildings and mosques. Nay, dynasties did not spare their own members, nor religions their own shrines. If a capital or fort or sanctuary was not completed in the lifetime of the builder, there was small chance of its being finished, there was a very fair chance of its being despoiled, by his successor and heir. The environs of Delhi are a wilderness of deserted cities and devastated tombs. Each fresh conqueror, Hindu, or Moghul, or Pathan, marched, so to speak, to his own immortality over his predecessor's grave.

In our attitude towards birds we were not far removed from a barbarian age. We allowed our boys to despoil birds' nests of their eggs; we still kept captive most beautiful objects of God's creation which were never intended for imprisonment; and we allowed gamekeepers to kill owls and also the kingfisher, the most exquisite bird that could be seen on the streams of this country, because it was supposed to devour juvenile trout. If a rare bird, a bittern or a buzzard, appeared in any neighbourhood, no effort was made for its protection. On the contrary, it was slaughtered by a local sportsman, who wrote to the local journal to boast of his "glorious" achievement.

I agree with you about the absurdity of shunting the Jews back into Palestine, a tiny country which has lost its fertility and only supports meagre herds of sheep and goats with occasional terraced plots of cultivation. You cannot expel the present Moslem occupation. You cannot turn the Jews into small cultivators and grazers. You cannot turn all the various sects, religion and denominations out of Jerusalem. I cannot conceive a worse bondage to which to relegate an advanced and intellectual community than to exile in Palestine.

I believe that the Durbar, more than any event in modern history, showed to the Indian people the path which, under the guidance of Providence, they are treading, taught the Indian Empire its unity, and impressed the world with its moral as well as material force. It will not be forgotten. The sound of the trumpets has already died away; the captains and the kings have departed; but the effect produced by this overwhelming display of unity and patriotism is still alive and will not perish. Everywhere it is known that upon the throne of the East is seated a power that has made of the sentiments, the aspirations, and the interests of 300 millions of Asiatics a living thing, and the units in that great aggregation have learned that in their incorporation lies their strength. As a disinterested spectator of the Durbar remarked, Not until to-day did I realise that the destinies of the East still lie, as they always have done, in the hollow of India’s hand. I think, too, that the Durbar taught the lesson not only of power but of duty. There was not an officer of Government there present, there was not a Ruling Prince nor a thoughtful spectator, who must not at one moment or other have felt that participation in so great a conception carried with it responsibility as well as pride, and that he owed something in return for whatever of dignity or security or opportunity the Empire had given him.

For where else in the world has a race gone forth and subdued, not a country or a kingdom, but a continent, and that continent peopled, not by savage tribes, but by races with traditions and a civilisation older than our own, with a history not inferior to ours in dignity or romance; subduing them not to the law of the sword, but to the rule of justice, bringing peace and order and good government to nearly one-fifth of the entire human race, and holding them with so mild a restraint that the rulers are the merest handful amongst the ruled, a tiny speck of white foam upon a dark and thunderous ocean?

I regarded the conservation of ancient monuments as one of the primary obligations of Government. We have a duty to our forerunners, as well as to our contemporaries and to our descendants,—nay, our duty to the two latter classes in itself demands the recognition of an obligation to the former, since we are the custodians for our own age of that which has been bequeathed to us by an earlier, and since posterity will rightly blame us if, owing to our neglect, they fail to reap the same advantages that we have been privileged to enjoy.

"and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty, where it did not before exist-that is enough, that is the Englishman's justification in India. It is good enough for his watchword while he is here, for his epitaph when he is gone. I have worked for no other aim. Let India be my judge."62