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It is the Indian poor, the Indian peasant, the patient, humble, silent millions, the 80 per cent who subsist by agriculture, who know very little of … - George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
" "It is the Indian poor, the Indian peasant, the patient, humble, silent millions, the 80 per cent who subsist by agriculture, who know very little of policies, but who profit or suffer by their results, and whom men's eyes, even the eyes of their own countrymen, too often forget—to whom I refer. He has been in the background of every policy for which I have been responsible, of every surplus of which I have assisted in the disposition. We see him not in the splendour and opulence, nor even in the squalor, of great cities; he reads no newspapers, for, as a rule, he cannot read at all; he has no politics. But he is the bone and sinew of the country, by the sweat of his brow the soil is tilled, from his labour comes one-fourth of the national income, he should be the first and the final object of every Viceroy's regard.
English
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About George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, (11 January 1859 – 20 March 1925), known as The Lord Curzon of Kedleston between 1898 and 1911 and as The Earl Curzon of Kedleston between 1911 and 1921, was a British Conservative statesman who was Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, but who was passed over as Prime Minister in 1923 in favour of Stanley Baldwin. The Curzon Line was named after him.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess, Viscount Scarsdale, Baron Ravensdale Curzon
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George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquis of Kedleston
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Marquis of Curzon George Nathaniel Curzon
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George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquis of Curzon
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George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess, Viscount Scarsdale, Baron Ravensdale Curzon of Kedleston
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Baron Curzon of Kedleston
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Lord Curzon
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Additional quotes by George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
Never sacrifice a subject interest—that is, the interest of a subject dependency or possession—to exclusively British interests. Do not force upon your dependencies a policy which may be distasteful or unsuitable to them, merely because it is advantageous to yourselves. The meaning of empire is not to impose on dependencies the will of the Mother Country or master power, but to effect a harmonious co-ordination of the interests of the whole.
I believe that the people of this country will be very loth to condemn those whose only disloyalty it will be to have been excessive in their loyalty to the King. I do not think that the people of this country will call those "rebels" whose only form of rebellion it is to insist on remaining under the Imperial Parliament under which we all live. And depend upon it when the first blow is struck—and my argument is that it will be struck—when the first blow is struck you will kindle a flame that will rush through the country like a forest fire and will not stop until you have been consumed.
I suppose that to the bulk of Englishmen present today the Indian Mutiny of 1857 is already a tradition, rather than a memory. It happened before many of us were born. Already it is receding into the dim corridors of the past, and is surrounded with an almost mystic halo as one of the great national epics of our race. But to all of us, young or old, it is one of the combined tragedies and glories of the British nation—a tragedy because there were concentrated into those terrible months the agony and the suffering almost of centuries; a glory because great names leaped to light, high and ennobling deeds were done, and best of all, and most enduring of all, there sprang from all that havoc and disaster the majestic fabric of an India united under a single Crown, governed as we have tried to govern it, and are still trying to govern it, by the principles of justice, truth, and righteousness—a spectacle which, if the entire Empire were to shrivel up to-morrow like a scroll in the fire, would still be a supreme vindication of its existence and its accomplishment in the history of mankind.
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