Autograph letter signed by Prime Minister the 5th Earl of Rosebery dated 1896

ROSEBERY, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of. [Prime Minister] — Substantial letter in relation to the Hamidian massacres 1894–1896.
 
Autograph letter signed (“Rosebery”) to R. W. Campbell Esq., 38 Berkeley Square, 18 September 1896. 4pp., 1 sheet folded, on headed paper marked “Private”. Old folds and the odd mark, otherwise excellent near fine letter.
 
A substantial letter written in the aftermath of the Armenian massacres of 1894–96, in which Rosebery—by then a former Prime Minister—sets out his private view on Britain’s moral and diplomatic position.
 
Rosebery rejects his correspondent’s comparison between the atrocities and the earlier “Bulgarian Question” that had stirred Gladstone to outrage in the 1870s, observing that “the situation in no degree resembles that of the Bulgarian question. Mr Gladstone had Russia at his back at that time, while in the Armenian question we have lately had Russia all against us.” Britain, he insists, is isolated: “We are in isolation—or were a short time ago,” and he warns that to urge Britain to act “single-handed is to urge a course which might bring about a European war” and “produce horrors a thousand-fold worse than those which have lately taken place.” Though deeply moved by “the hideous state of misery in Turkey”, he counsels restraint, arguing that the Government must “proceed cautiously for fear of bringing about an even worse condition of things than that now existing.”
 
The letter dates from Rosebery’s period of semi-retirement following his brief premiership (March 1894–June 1895), when he had succeeded Gladstone but failed to hold together the divided Liberal Party. In 1896, Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister, and Britain faced an intense wave of public outrage at reports of the Sultan’s massacres of Armenians. While Gladstone, then in his eighties, had condemned the atrocities in religious and moral terms, Salisbury refused to intervene militarily, fearing that Britain would stand alone against Russia, France, and Germany. Rosebery here adopts a middle ground—sympathetic to the humanitarian impulse yet acutely aware of geopolitical reality.
 
An exceptional and lengthy letter of foreign-policy reflection by a former Prime Minister at a moment of national moral crisis.