Diplomats Of The United Kingdom

"I had known Curzon for many years, had had him as a colleague at the India Office; had exchanged weekly letters with him ever since he became Viceroy, and had acquired a most sincere admiration for his very remarkable gifts. He was wonderfully well equipped for political success: he had a first-rate intellect, immense energy and industry; a genius for detail, a copious supply of fluent speech, and a most hearty and unfeigned interest in himself and his own career. He longed for power and pre-eminence, and was sincerely anxious to use them for what he believed to be good purposes; but he was equally anxious that his good deeds should be fully and conspicuously recognized. At no period of his life did he make the mistake of underrating himself."

"Lord Curzon lived in somewhat Olympian isolation and saw few members of the staff except his principal private secretary and the Permanent Under-Secretary. I never met him. But he was a superb drafter and exacted a high standard of accuracy and clarity from the departments. His minutes were models, often combining wit and malice... Whatever may be thought of British foreign policy at this time, there is no doubt that under Curzon and Crowe the machinery of the office was more efficient than it has ever been. But this was not achieved without effort. Curzon insisted not only on good work but on long hours."

"It is only when you get to see and realise what India is—that she is the strength and the greatness of England—it is only then that you feel that every nerve a man may strain, every energy he may put forward, cannot be devoted to a nobler purpose than keeping tight the cords that hold India to ourselves."

"Lord Curzon is not a man towards whom it is possible to feel indifferent or neutral. On the one side were the men attracted or dominated by his superlative capacity, on the other those whom he had annoyed, or even alienated, by his trenchancy and "drive.""

"My own recollections of Calcutta incline to be a medley of only loosely connected impressions. A recognition of how much India has owed to Lord Curzon for the impulse that he gave to the preservation of her historical treasures, in part expressed in the Victoria Memorial."

"The strength and omnipotence of England everywhere in the East is amazing. No other country or people is to be compared with her. We control everything, and are liked as well as respected and feared."

"Curzon is an intolerable person to do business with—pompous, dictatorial and outrageously conceited... Really he is an intolerable person, pig-headed, pompous and vindictive too! Yet an able, strong man with it all."

"The Taj is incomparable, designed like a palace and finished like a jewel—a snow-white emanation starting from a bed of cypresses and backed by a turquoise sky, pure, perfect and unutterably lovely. One feels the same sensation as in gazing at a beautiful woman, one who has that mixture of loveliness and sadness which is essential to the highest beauty."

"Thirty-five years ago he and I were young men in London, with different outlooks, with different social surroundings, with different ideas about our careers, but an intimacy sprung up which was never checked... Three things distinguished him then, as they did later: unflinching courage, a wide devotion to the State which always looked beyond himself, and an unshakable resolution when he had made up his mind. With these qualities Lord Curzon went to India as Viceroy. It is not necessary to agree about everything in his policy in order to appreciate how great an administrator Lord Curzon was there... I know, not by his testimony but by the testimony of others, that by his courage and his determination to see justice done he redressed many an individual evil and put right much that a man of less energy and tenacity of purpose than himself could not have put right... He was a man in a high sense of the word... We shall look back upon his figure, we shall look back upon it as a figure which was that of a great Englishman, and we shall look back upon that figure with pride in our race."

"Such is the street life of Peking, a phantasmagoria of excruciating incident, too bewildering to grasp, too aggressive to acquiesce in, too absorbing to escape."

"He has travelled a lot; he knows about the countries of the world. He has read a lot. He is full of knowledge which none of us possesses. He is useful in council. He is not a good executant and has no tact, but he is valuable for the reasons stated."

"Rightly or wrongly, it appears to me that the continued existence of this country is bound up in the maintenance—aye I will go further and say even in the extension of the British Empire."

"I have just been up in the interior of Siam to some amazing ruins, the finest in the world. It is a place called Angkor, and there a race that has since perished came some 1,700 years ago from India, founded a mighty empire and built palaces and temples that rival those of Nineveh or Karnak. Now they are buried in a tropical forest, and one has to cut a path with a billhook to see their ruins."

"I don't know about Curzon. He is very able, very just (he has never had sufficient credit for his Indian administration)[,] a great public servant, but he is not very accessible to new ideas."

"Curzon's tireless energy, inexhaustible industry and unique gift of setting out in proper perspective and with eloquence the facts of a complicated issue were an asset to the War Cabinet. What he lacked was resource in finding solutions to the problems which he could state so well, but this really mattered little because Lloyd George was himself resourceful. His little peculiarities—his pompous manner, ignorance (partly a pose) of democracy, and so forth—were a source of inexhaustible amusement to Lloyd George, who would listen with delight to any addition to the humorous stories and legends which grew up round Curzon during the war."

"Curzon's powers of observation and analysis were extraordinary; no detail ever escaped him. His book [Persia and the Persian Question] can still be used as a topographical guide for travel in Iran."

"After every other Viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India."

"It is impossible to over-estimate the magnificent work Lord Curzon did for India in his constant care for its priceless archæological treasures."

"I have seen him so hysterical that I have felt he must go clean off his head at any moment: and I have seen him so sane and so balanced under the greatest provocation that I have felt that no one could compete with him in sanity and clarity of vision. I have seen him simple and unassuming in his manner, as jolly as a schoolboy and entirely unaffected: and I have seen him so theatrical that I have wondered whether he had not mistaken his vocation and ought not to have made a career on the stage, even as a low comedian."

"I am convinced that a true son of Iran would sooner lie than tell the truth; and that he feels twinges of desperate remorse when, upon occasions, he has thoughtlessly strayed into veracity. Yet they are an agreeable people—agreeable to encounter, agreeable to associate with; perhaps not least agreeable to leave behind. From this composite presentment it is perhaps difficult to extract any really reliable basis of sanguine prognostication. Nevertheless there remain three attributes of the Persian character which lead me to think that that people are not yet, as has been asserted, wholly 'played out'; that they are neither sunk in the sombre atrophy of the Turk, nor threatened with the ignoble doom of the Tartar; but that there are chances of a possible redemption. These are their irrepressible vitality; an imitativeness long notorious in the East, and capable of honourable utilisation; and, in spite of occasional testimony to the contrary, a healthy freedom from deep-seated prejudice or bigotry. History suggests that the Persians will insist upon surviving themselves; present indications that they will gradually absorb the accomplishments of others."

"The Persian character presents many complex features, elsewhere rarely united in the same individual. They are an amiable and a polished race, and have the manners of gentlemen. They are vivacious in temperament, intelligent in conversation, and acute in conduct. If their hearts are soft, which is, I believe, undeniable, there is no corresponding weakness of the head. On the other hand, they are consummate hypocrites, very corrupt, and lamentably deficient in stability or courage... Whilst, as individuals, they present many attractive features, as a community they are wholly wanting in elements of real nobility or grandeur. With one gift only can they be credited on a truly heroic scale; and this, though it may endear them to the student of human nature as a fine art, will excite the stern repugnance of the moralist. I allude to their faculty for what a Puritan might call mendacious, but what I prefer to style imaginative, utterance. This is inconceivable and enormous."

"Courage, devotion, public service: the magnitude of England, the integrity of beauty, the glory of work; such were the ideals by which he achieved his victory, by which he triumphed over pain and tragedy and disappointment."

"The very epitome of snobbishness and embodiment of the exclusive hereditary principle."

"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?"

"Whatever be Russia's designs upon India, whether they be serious and inimical or imaginary and fantastic, I hold that the first duty of English statesmen is to render any hostile intentions futile, to see that our own position is secure, and our frontier impregnable, and so to guard what is without doubt the noblest trophy of British genius, and the most splendid appanage of the Imperial Crown."

"He was universally called pompous: but he had the most intense sense of humour, and I have even seen him turn it on himself. His irritability surpassed anything I have ever experienced in the male sex: but it must always be remembered that he was hardly ever out of pain. He suffered from absurd megalomania in regard to his knowledge of art, his worldly possessions and his social position: but I have seen him display a humility about people and things, which was almost pathetic. At all events the vision of the Marquess which will always remain the most vivid in my mind was after one deadly winter night's work—it was already 3 a.m.—when he stood with me on the steps of Carlton House Terrace, helped me into my coat and insisted on calling me a taxi himself. "I hope you won't get cold," he said, "getting home...and Chelsea is such a long way off." I never knew which made him most sorry for me, the fact that he had kept me working so late, or the fact that it was so cold, or the fact that I had the misfortune to live in such a terribly un-aristocratic suburb."

"I very much doubt if, since the palmy days of Mr. Gladstone, there has been any public man who combined so wide a range of interest in many subjects, and such an easy grasp of their general features, with so close and laborious attention to detail and the power of working out that detail."

"Lord Curzon is animated by a sincere and perfervid patriotism. He displays none of that tepid cosmopolitanism which, when carried to an extreme, as is not unfrequently the case, degenerates into an ignoble depreciation of his country's worth. The love of his native country, that root which in the doggerel but profoundly true verse of the poet Churchill “never fails to bring forth golden fruit,” burns brightly within him. He is ever seeking to link the actions of the present with the grandeur of the historic past."

"A system whose ends were virtuous was beset by vices, most of them bureaucratic and racial. They were uncovered and vigorously dealt with by Lord Curzon, who arrived in Calcutta in January 1899. He was a man of vision who, unlike his predecessors, had wanted his position and came to it with an unequalled knowledge of Asian affairs. Curzon was certainly the most attractive and intelligent Viceroy, and India's best ruler under the British Raj. He was not an easy master in that he recognised and upbraided incompetence and procrastination."

"The Imperialism which Lord Curzon favours is not that of nation-devouring Rome, whose heavy hand, albeit its weight was to some extent tempered by the humanizing influence of Hellas, numbed the intellect and chilled the nascent aspirations of the subject-races which fell under her sway. Rather is it a vivifying force on which the populations incorporated into the British Empire may readily graft and develop all that is best in their own national characteristics."

"He was a late worker and I should think never left a paper on his table at night that he had not read."

"Oh! it has been an amazing tour; all new; Korea, Peking, Tonking, Annam, Cochin China, Cambogia; visits to fading oriental courts; audiences with dragon-robed emperors and kings; long hard rides all the day; vile, sleepless, comfortless nights; excursions by sea boat, by river boat, on horseback, pony back and elephant back; in chairs, hammocks and palanquins."

"Placed at a maritime coign of vantage upon the flank of Asia, precisely analogous to that occupied by Great Britain on the flank of Europe, exercising a powerful influence over the adjoining continent, but not necessarily involved in its responsibilities, she Japan] sets before herself the supreme ambition of becoming, on a smaller scale, the Britain of the Far East."

"He was likewise determined to prevent famine from being used as a cause for reform. With hunger spreading on an unprecedented scale through two-thirds of the subcontinent, he ordered his officials to publicly attribute the crisis strictly to drought. When an incautious member of the Legislative Council in Calcutta, Donald Smeaton, raised the problem of over-taxation, he was (in Boer War parlance) prompdy "Stellenboshed." Although Curzons own appetite for viceregal pomp and circumstance was notorious, he lectured starving villagers that "any Government which imperilled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralised the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime.""

"If I had done nothing else in India I have written my name here, and the letters are a living joy."

"When the figure of Lord Beaconsfield vanishes from the House of Lords and when that of Mr. Gladstone ceases to rise from the front bench on either side of the table in the House of Commons—the country will confess that its two greatest and only Statesmen have gone. Parliament will go on as before, public business will be transacted, speeches made, policies challenged and vindicated, Budgets expounded, Motions brought forward, passed, rejected, but the pre-eminent importance attaching to the doings and sayings of a Statesman will be wanting—and men will lament the degeneracy of the age."

"We talked of Curzon. L. G. said he had great knowledge—information of a sort which is uncommon amongst British politicians. He knows foreign countries; he has travelled widely. He is dogmatic and often unreasonable, but he brings something to the general stock which is very valuable."

"Hardly less critical was the situation left by the Mudania armistice with Turkey. Even while the election was on Curzon had gone to Lausanne to spend nearly three months in strenuous controversy with Ismet Pasha. By sheer force of knowledge, debating ability and personality, he secured a far better peace than could have been expected. The difficult question of Mosul was postponed, and left to me to deal with more than two years later. As regard this our diplomatic and administrative position was seriously handicapped by the reckless advocates of economy at all costs in Parliament, in the Press and, not least, in a section of the Cabinet, which included Bonar Law himself, who were all for scuttle all round. Happily Curzon had charge of the Cabinet Committee which dealt with both Iraq and Palestine and, as a member of the Committee, I was greatly impressed by the sheer skill of draftsmanship which enabled him to get his way, first with his Committee and then with the Cabinet."

"[O]ne of the keys to Lord Curzon's life is to remember that his roots had struck deep into pre-industrial England, and it is from an early England that he drew the sources of his strength."

"There is no doubt that, while he has always been and always was a man whose heart and soul were for England and the Empire, yet his best friends would own that it was India and the East that held his imagination from his early youth until the end of his life. He regarded the presence of the Englishman in India as the presence of a man with a mission, and he regarded him as the servant of our country on a sacred mission. He never flinched from those high ideals and earnest endeavours, and, in spite of all, he held the scales of justice even in that great country."

"My name is George Nathaniel Curzon, I am a most superior person. My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek, I dine at Blenheim once a week."

"India must always remain a constellation rather than a country, a congeries of races rather than a single nation. But we are creating ties of unity among those widely diversified peoples, we are consolidating those vast and outspread territories, and, what is more important, we are going forward instead of backward. It is not a stationary, a retrograde, a downtrodden, or an impoverished India that I have been governing for the past five and a half years. Poverty there is in abundance. I defy any one to show me a great and populous city, where it does not exist. Misery and destitution there are. The question is not whether they exist, but whether they are growing more or growing less. In India, where you deal with so vast a canvas, I daresay the lights and shades of human experience are more vivid and more dramatic than elsewhere. But if you compare the India of today with the India of any previous period of history-the India of Alexander, of Asoka, of Akbar, or of Aurangzeb-you will find greater peace and tranquillity, more widely suffused comfort and contentment, superior justice and humanity, and higher standards of material well-being, than that great dependency has ever previously attained.""

""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"

"I have been collecting opinions about Curzon during my travels, and I am gradually coming to the conclusion that he is a great Viceroy. The majority of people perhaps dislike him intensely, almost always giving as their reason some childish gossip about his bad manners; but the best men I have met have been without exception his devoted admirers. They say he is a man full of courage and strenuousness, no respecter of persons, and not to be bound by red tape, but ready to take advice if there is commonsense in it, and always bent on going to the root of every matter that comes before him."

"[Frenchmen] are not the sort of people one would go tiger-shooting with."

"India was "the land not only of romance but of obligation." Curzon told members of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce at a dinner in 1903, "If I thought it were all for nothing, and that you and I ... were simply writing inscriptions on the sand to be washed out by the next tide, if I felt that we were not working here for the good of India in obedience to a higher law and to a nobler aim, then I would see the link that holds England and India together severed without a sigh. But it is because I believe in the future of this country, and in the capacity of our own race to guide it to goals that it has never hitherto attained, that I keep courage and press forward."47"

"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"

"No one had ever challenged unpopularity among his own people so fearlessly as [Curzon] did in his endeavours... to secure even justice for Indians against Europeans."

"We endeavoured to frame a plague policy which should not do violence to the instincts and sentiments of the native population; a famine policy which should profit by the experience of the past and put us in a position to cope with the next visitation when unhappily it bursts upon us; an education policy which should free the intellectual activities of the Indian people, so keen and restless as they are, from the paralysing clutch of examinations; a railway policy that will provide administratively and financially for the great extension that we believe to lie before us; an irrigation policy that will utilise to the maximum, whether remuneratively or unremuneratively, all the available water resources of India, not merely in canals.... but in tanks and reservoirs and wells; a police policy that will raise standard of the only emblem of authority that the majority of the people see, and will free then from petty diurnal tyranny and oppression.... [T]he administrator looks rather to the silent and inarticulate masses, and if he can raise, even by a little, the level of material comfort and well-being in their lives, he has earned his reward...."

"I do not see how any Englishman, contrasting India as it now is with what it was, and would certainly have been under any other conditions than British rule, can fail to see that we came and have stayed here under no blind or capricious impulse, but in obedience to what some (of whom I am one) would call the decree of Providence, others the law of destiny in any case for the lasting benefit of millions of the human race. We often make great mistakes here: we are sometimes hard, and insolent, and overbearing: we are a good deal strangled with red tape. But none the less, I do firmly believe that there is no Government in the world (and I have seen most) that rests on so secure a moral basis, or that is more freely animated by duty.""