Not even a public figure. A man of no experience. And of the utmost insignificance. The utmost insignificance. - George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston

"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

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.

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