"مسألة الشرق الأوسط أو بعض المشكلات السياسية المتعلقة بدفاع الهند" [و‎‎٩] (٦١٦/٢٢)

PREFACE
^T^HIS volume has grown out of a series of letters
A written for The Times, to whose proprietors 1
am indebted for permission to make the fullest use
of them, during a journey I made through Persia and
down the Persian Gulf, as well as to different points
of the Indian frontier, in the autumn and winter of
1902-3, before and after attending the Coronation
Durbar at Delhi. In order to place before my readers
a more complete survey of the question which I had
outlined in those letters, I have not merely revised
them and brought them, as far as possible, up to date,
but I have, to some extent, recast them, and introduced
a large amount of altogether new material.
I must leave these pages to speak for themselves;
but as the book I published early in 1896 on The Far
Eastern Question was, I think, the first to call public
attention to the gravity of the problems with which,
as the result of the war between China and Japan, we
were about to be confronted in Eastern Asia, I may
perhaps, without too much presumption, be allowed
to say that the more subtle changes of which I have
attempted to describe the progress in Middle Asia
appear to me to be fraught with consequences of even
greater moment to the British Empire.
In Persia especially—where I had travelled eighteen
years before, on my way back from a journey to India
—it was sufficient to compare the conditions that pre
vailed there in 1884 and in 1902 in order to be im
pressed with the rapidity with which events are now