THE PERSIAN PROBLEM.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIII, Issue 4, 5 January 1907, Page 13

THE PERSIAN PROBLEM.

An answer given in the Commons by ■Mr. Runciman on 29th October has confirmed the news that large negotiations between Great Britain and Russia with regard to Persia are now in progress. The Tribune says : — There is no denying tho reality of each power's local in- • terests. Russia has pushed her trado in the north with great zeal and at heavy • sacrifices to her own overtaxed peasantry, by bounties, subsidies, and banks, trained on a Cossack model the only reliable troops -which the Shah possesses, and built as a private enterprise at least one excellent carriage road. Her loans to the Shah, (raised in Paris at four per cent., to be lent again in Teheran at six) reach a total of from four to five millions, and last, but not least, the Customs are virtually in her hands, thanks to the Belgian officials, who everywhere in the East act, with little concealment, as her agents. Trade, too, has gone to her, and has left us, ever since she concluded, by a clever uevice, the secret tariff treaty, which, under a specious disguise, favoured Russian but penalised English imports and exports. Up to the Japanese war she certainly had most of the cards in her hands. We could point only to our great work in policing the Persian Gulf, to our still large but menaced trade, and to the vital interests, political an* military, which we have in the south-east, as a neighbouring power. But of late there have been signs of a change. There has been an uprising of the miserable population, led by a patriotic section of the 'Mullahs, against the Ministers who had, "sold the country to the in-> fidel," and the leaders, who demanded — and obtained — a constitution, took refuge at the British Residency, as though they saw in us their natural protectors. One can foresee the probable course of events — it has already been rehearsed with a difference in Egypt. There is to-day a Shah who borrows, like the Khedive Ismail, to tiae ruin of his people, and in so doing pats himself at the mercy of the foreigner. His people may revolt (as they are doing already) and turn not only against him, but against tfne or both of the foreigners. Bankx-uptcy is always held to be a pretest for intervention ; revolt is always an accepted excuse for occupation. Sooner or later such an arrangement would end in the destruction of the last fiction of Persian independence, and in the ruin of Persia as a nation, precisely at a moment when some sections, at least, of her degraded and down-teod-den society seem to be passing through •a phase of liberalism -\tmch recalls the hopeful aspects of Arabi's Nationalism. To the entanglements and responsibilities in which such an adventure would involve us there might not soon be an end. Other powers would ask for compensations, and we who set out with the idea of securing a peace ■which might pave the way for a reduction of our Indian army, might find that, instead of being quit of our military problems, we had actually carried our advanced lines right np to the Russian positions. Much would turn in such an arrangement on the temper of .the other party. A Liberal England / and a Liberal Russia might contrive (without any delimitation or partition) to manage a joint control which would be helpful and unaggressive. But a Russia in transition is still the old Russia which has always had not only one, but several Governments. It is most unfortunate that the Novoe Vreraya should have formed the idea that we are suing for an understanding. Russia is doomed for so many years to military impotence that -we need be in! no hurry to secure her neutrality in theMiddle East. On the other hand, she ought to know that we have no thought of taking advantage of her weakness, that we should deplore her accession to a Holy Alliance with the other Conservative powers, and that we, in common with our friends in France, look forward to the end of her internal crisis and the establishment of constitutional government as an event which will render possible not merely a businesslike, arrangement, but a warm and popular* comradeship based on a common faith in democracy and peace.