IN MAY 1876 the Turks suppressed with atrocious severity an
attempted insurrection of Bulgarian nationalists. Reports of these
'Bulgarian atrocities', as they soon came to be called, ambiguously
but definitively, provoked a furious outburst of indignation in
England against the Turks and, more to the point, against the
pro-Turkish Eastern policy of Disraeli's government.

This 'Bulgarian atrocities agitation' deserves detailed study for
two principal reasons. It was, in itself, by far the greatest and most
illuminating revelation of the moral susceptibility of the High
Victorian public conscience. And it was, in its effect on Gladstone,
an event of profound political importance.

Yet these two aspects of the agitation have suffered undue
neglect. Attention has been concentrated almost exclusively on
observing the movement from outside, as a simple manifestation
of 'public opinion'. For this purpose. G. Carslake Thompson
Public Opinion and Lord Beaconsfield, 1875-1880 ( 1886) and Pro-
fessor David Harris Britain and the Bulgarian Horrors of 1876
( Chicago 1939) between them provide copious documentation of
the metropolitan press, Blue Book, and Hansard sources. To these
works, and of course to the late R. W. Seton-Watson standard
and authoritative study, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern
Question ( 1935), I refer those whose chief interest is in a chronolo-
gical narrative of the Eastern question as it impinged upon the
British public from 1875 to 1880. In the present study I have
attempted to exploit the potentialities of a rather different kind of
approach: I have tried, mainly through the reading of collections
of private papers, to interpret the agitation from inside, as an
entity with a life and character of its own.

The life of the agitation extended from July to December 1876,
the period which defines the chronological scope of this book.
With the collapse of the Conference of the powers at Constanti-
nople in January 1877 collapsed also the prayerful aspirations of
the public conscience which had sustained the atrocities agitation

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