George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston

"While the material forces which hold the Empire together, with the single exception of the Crown, are as precarious and as inchoate as I have shown them to be, there is one force and one only upon which we can rely to fill the gap, and to supply the cohesive influence we desire; and that is the sense, to which you appeal, of brotherhood between men and women, our fellow-subjects all round the great circumference of our Empire."

"There are coming from India as many as 70,000 of the pick of our forces, British and Indian... Why are these men coming? What has induced them to volunteer to take part in our fighting? They are thousands of miles away. They cannot hear the thunder or see the smoke of the guns. Their frontiers have not been crossed, their homes are not in jeopardy. They are not our kith and kin; no call of the blood appeals to them. Is it not clear that they are coming because the Empire means something to them, much more than mere government or power? It speaks to them of justice, of righteousness, of mercy, and of truth. They have no desire to exchange that rule for the Prussian sabre or the jackboot of the German trooper. They have no desire to change that rule for any other. If any testimony was ever required to the feelings by which they are actuated and to the success of the fundamental principles by which we have endeavoured to rule them, surely it is to be found in this convincing and overwhelming demonstration."

"From all parts of the earth we see this great march of the armies, white, yellow, brown, no longer any distinction of colour, all marching to the common centre, all inspired by the same cause, all bent on doing service on the same battlefield. Never before in history has there been anything to compare with this."

"The British people realise that they are fighting for the hegemony of the Empire. If necessary we shall continue the war single-handed."

"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."

"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."

"In a few weeks, or at most a few months, thanks to the skill of the Allied Commanders and the bravery of their men, the objects for which we and they have endured more than four years of sacrifice and suffering have been attained. The lands upon which the enemy had laid his cruel and predatory hand are in course of being evacuated. The exiled peoples are returning in joyous crowds across the war frontiers to their homes. The military power of the enemy is broken. His resources are spent. His armaments are in course of being surrendered. Hope breathes again in the souls of the unhappy peoples whom he has trampled in the mire. The impious spirit that claimed that Might was superior to Right and that there was no law but that of successful violence in the world has been exorcised, let us hope for ever. The conflict for international honour, righteousness, and freedom has been won, and the authors of this vast and wicked conspiracy against the liberties of mankind are fugitives on the face of the earth. My Lords, this is a great hour. It has been a wonderful victory. Are we presumptuous if we see in it the judgment of a Higher Power upon panoplied arrogance and enthroned wrong?"

"We may also, I think, congratulate ourselves on the part that the British Empire has played in this struggle, and on the position which it fills at the close. Among the many miscalculations of the enemy was the profound conviction, not only that we had a "contemptible little Army," but that we were a doomed and decadent nation. The trident was to be struck from our palsied grasp, the Empire was to crumble at the first shock; a nation dedicated, as we used to be told, to pleasure-taking and the pursuit of wealth was to be deprived of the place to which it had ceased to have any right, and was to be reduced to the level of a second-class, or perhaps even of a third-class Power. It is not for us in the hour of victory to boast that these predictions have been falsified; but, at least, we may say this—that the British Flag never flew over a more powerful or a more united Empire than now; Britons never had better cause to look the world in the face; never did our voice count for more in the councils of the nations, or in determining the future destinies of mankind. That that voice may be raised in the times that now lie before us in the interests of order and liberty, that that power may be wielded to secure a settlement that shall last, that that Flag may be a token of justice to others as well as of pride to ourselves, is our united hope and prayer."

"Japan is] a restless and aggressive Power, full of energy, somewhat like the Germans in mentality, seeking in every direction to push out and find an outlet for her ambitions."

"Not even a public figure. A man of no experience. And of the utmost insignificance. The utmost insignificance."

"No one is a more profound believer than myself in the policy of the Entente: and I do not rest that belief merely on the memories of the war, or on principles of self-interest; my conviction is based on the widest considerations of world peace and world progress. If France and ourselves permanently fall out, I see no prospect of the recovery of Europe or of the pacification of the world. To maintain that unity we have made innumerable sacrifices. During the last two years I have preached no other doctrine and I have pursued no other practice."

"It is not one, I think, of which we have any cause to be ashamed. We have endeavoured to exercise a steadying and moderating influence in the politics of the world, and I think and hope that we have conveyed not merely the impression, but the conviction that, whatever other Governments or countries may do, the British Government is never untrue to its word, is never disloyal to its colleagues or its allies, never does anything underhand or mean; and if this conviction be widespread, as I believe it to be, that is the real basis of the moral authority which the British Empire has long exerted and, I believe, will long continue to exert in the affairs of mankind."

"The obstacle has been Mackenzie King, the Canadian, who is both obstinate, tiresome and stupid."

"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.""

"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"

"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...."

"We have endeavoured to render the land revenue more equable in its incidence, to lift the load of usury from the shoulders of the peasant, and to check that reckless alienation of the soil which in many parts of the country was fast converting him from a free proprietor to a bond slave. We have done our best to encourage industries which little by little will relieve the congested field of agriculture, develop the indigenous resources of India, and make that country more and more self-providing in the future. I would not indulge in any boast, but I dare to think that as a result of these efforts I can point to an India that is more prosperous, more contented, and more hopeful. Wealth is increasing in India. There is no test you can apply which does not demonstrate it. Trade is growing. Evidences of progress and prosperity are multiplying on every side.6°"

"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"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

""All civilization", said Lord Curzon, quoting Renan, "all civilization has been the work of aristocracies". ... It would be much more true to say "The upkeep of aristocracies has been the hard work of all civilizations"."

"The morning had been golden; the noontide was bronze; and the evening lead. But all were solid, and each was polished till it shone after its fashion."

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

"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."

"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 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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The symbol of Empire in its noon-tide splendour."

"A common idea of him is that of a strenuous and autocratic ruler, excelling in the domain of high policy and the maintenance of "Imperial" power, but out of sympathy with the needs and aspirations of the common people. To those who may have been infected by this prevalent misconception it will be a surprise to find that no Viceroy was ever more zealous for the welfare of the lowliest class of his subordinates, more ready to investigate and redress the grievance of any petitioner, however humble, or more resolutely determined to ensure justice to all the toiling millions submitted to his sway."

"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.""