ABSTRACT
As the British plenipotentiary to the Constantinople conference and later at the Foreign Office, Salisbury was compelled to work for the substantial preservation of Ottoman authority and territory. Derby's purpose was to keep Britain out of the European conflagration which, he said to a deputation of working men at the Foreign Office in September 1876, would in all probability result from any attempt at partitioning the Ottoman empire. Derby was still more outspoken, telling a deputation at the Foreign Office that the foreign minister who took France into the war of 1870 "did not come out of it with a light heart neither he, nor his master, nor his country". By now Beaconsfield rightly considered Derby to be for "peace at any price", in the context of the Eastern question, but he counted on Salisbury to support a threat of war if Russia succeeded in taking Constantinople and refused to give it up in a peace treaty.
