"Calm, sardonic, and pessimistic, Salisbury in many ways matched the spirit of the times. He did not, like Gladstone, assert the importance of moral principle in international life. His objective, in an increasingly dangerous world, was to protect essential British interests (the defence of the Raj against Russian incursions and the protection of the sea lanes to India through the Suez Canal and through the longer route via South Africa across the Indian Ocean), but to do so by preserving the peace and thus minimizing expenditure in the cause of domestic stability. To this difficult task Salisbury brought two great diplomatic skills. He clearly saw the interconnections between imperial issues and shifts in the European power game; and he showed a remarkable aptitude for isolating whichever foreign power happened, at any moment, to be Britain's principal enemy."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandAnglicans from the United KingdomUniversity of Oxford facultyConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (2004), p. 259
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil%2C_3rd_Marquess_of_Salisbury
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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (3 February 1830 – 22 August 1903), styled Lord Robert Cecil before the death of his elder brother in 1865, and Viscount Cranborne from June 1865 until his father died in April 1868, was a three-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, during 1885–1886, 1886–1892 and 1895–1902.
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