Page:The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (1910).djvu/18

xii a basis of agreement. If two travellers wish to go to Penzance they can discuss with profit the best way of getting there; but if one wishes to go to Penzance and the other to John o’Groat’s House, such discussion is obviously futile.

To apply this principle to the present case. In all that I have written in this book I have implicitly assumed:

(1) That in this world diversity, not uniformity, is the higher law and the more desirable state.

(2) That everything in this world has its own generic perfection, or, as the Bábís quaintly phrase it, its own Paradise, which is only attainable by the realization of its own highest potentialities, not by the adoption or attempted adoption of the attributes of something else.

(3) That, whether it be a question of individuals or nations, the destruction of a distinctive type is a loss to the universe and therefore an evil.

These doctrines or dogmas, like all dogmas which rest on a philosophical conception of the universe and have been not only accepted but assimilated, necessarily colour one’s whole view of the many questions to which they relate. But they are, perhaps, rather “the choice of a soul” than matters susceptible of proof. Suppose I have a beautiful garden filled with flowers of innumerable kinds which I love and which fills me with gladness and pride, and suppose some utilitarian bids me dig up and cast away these beautiful flowers, and plant the garden with potatoes or cabbages, or even with one kind of beautiful flower only, on the ground that I shall thereby make more money, or produce a more useful crop, I cannot argue with him, I can only oppose him with all my strength. And when people say (as, unhappily, many people in this country do say) that Persia is a backward country, which, in the hands of its own people cannot be “developed,” or only very slowly, and that the best thing that can happen is that some European Power, whether England or Russia, should step in and “develop” it, whether its people like it or not, I feel as I do about the flower-garden, that no material prosperity, no amount of railways, mines, gaols, gas, or drainage can compensate the world, spiritually and intellectually, for the loss of Persia. And this is what the occupation and adminis-