"مسألة الشرق الأوسط أو بعض المشكلات السياسية المتعلقة بدفاع الهند" [و‎‎١‎٥] (٦١٦/٣٤)

THE FUTURE OF ASIA
5
In these pregnant sentences Lord Curzon defined,
with the authority belonging alike to his intimate know
ledge of Asiatic countries and peoples and to the high
office he holds under the Crown, the question with
which British statesmanship is confronted in what
Captain Mahan has aptly christened ''The Middle
East," that is to say, in those regions of Asia which
extend to the borders of India or command the ap
proaches to India, and which are consequently bound
up with the problems of Indian political as well as
military defence. The Middle Eastern Question is
itself only a part of a much larger question upon
which the future of Asia depends. It is not indeed
a new question, for it has occupied the minds of
far-sighted statesmen for generations past. It is a
continuation of the same question with which we have
long been familiar in the Near East. It is closely con
nected with the more novel development of international
rivalry in the Far East. It is the outcome of that con
stant projection of European forces—moral, commercial,
and military—into Asia which is slowly but steadily
transforming all the conditions that enabled us to
achieve, and so far to retain, as the masters of India, a
position of unparalleled ascendency in the Asiatic
Continent.
Owing partly to the innate conservatism of the
British mind, which is both self-reliant and slow to
move, prone to criticism yet fundamentally optimistic,
and partly to the immense complexity of our national
interests scattered over a world-wide Empire which has
been built up by a series of individual efforts rather
than by any uniform and collective design, we are apt
as a nation to take things as we find them, and having
no reason to be dissatisfied with them on the whole, we