§ LORD CURZON OF KEDLESTONMy Lords, with the permission of the House I beg to ask the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs a Question which has been on the Paper for a week, and which I postponed at the request of the noble Lord. It is, whether the autograph promise of the Shah of Persia given to His Majesty's Government in March, 1889, and repeated on several occasions at a later date, that Great Britain should have priority in the construction of any southern railway to Teheran, that if concessions for railways were given to others in the north, a similar concession should be granted to an English company in the south, and that no southern railway concession in Persia should be granted to any foreign company without consultation with His Majesty's Government, which promise was referred to by Lord Cranborne in the House of Commons on 18th February, 1903, and by the Marquess of Lansdowne in the House of Lords on 5th May, 1903, is still regarded by His Majesty's Government as operative, or whether it has been abrogated or modified by the Anglo-Russian Convention of 31st August, 1907.
THE UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Lord FITZMAURICE)My Lords, His Majesty's Government certainly intend, in the event of railway construction in the 293 north of Persia, to demand the fulfilment of the pledge given by Nasir-ed-Din Shah on 16th September, 1888, and recognised as binding by Mousaffir-ed-Din Shah in 1900. The Anglo-Russian Agreement would clearly prevent His Majesty's Government from constructing a railway line as far as Teheran, but the pledge given by the Shah in 1888, would justify His Majesty's Government in claiming to be allowed to construct a line in Southern Persia, should they desire to do so, in the event of the Russian Government obtaining a concession to construct one in the north. The Russian Government have undertaken by the Agreement not to oppose concessions supported by His Majesty's Government in the British sphere, nor without previous discussion with His Majesty's Government in the neutral zone either. There is, however, no prospect of railway construction in Persia so long as the Russo-Persian Railway Convention is in force.