te loyalty to the Khedive's
Government demanded. During his mission into Abyssinia his natural
demands for support were completely ignored, and he was left to
whatever fate might befall him. When he succeeded in extricating
himself from that perilous position, he found that the Khedive was so
annoyed at his inability to exact from his truculent neighbour a
treaty without any accompanying concessions, that he paid no
attention to him, and seized the opportunity to hasten the close of
his appointment by wilfully perverting the sense of several
confidential suggestions made to his Government. The plain explanation
of these miserable intrigues was that the official class at Cairo,
seeing that Gordon had alienated the sympathy and support of the
British Foreign Office and its representatives by his staunch and
outspoken defence of Ismail in 1878, realised that the moment had come
to terminate his, to them, always hateful Dictatorship in the Soudan.
While the Cairo papers were allowed to couple the term "mad" with his
name, the Ministers went so far as to denounce his propositions as
inconsistent. One of these Ministers had been Gordon's enemy for
years; another had been banished by him from Khartoum for cruelty;
they were one and all sympathetic to the very order of things which
Gordon had destroyed, and which, as long as he retained power, would
never be revived. What wonder that they should snatch the favourable
opportunity of precipitating the downfall of the man they had so long
feared! But it was neither creditable nor politic for the
representatives of England to stand by while these schemes were
executed to the detraction of the man who had then given six years'
disinterested and laborious effort to the regeneration of the Soudan
and the suppression of the slave trade.

When Gordon discovered that his secret representations, sent in cipher
for the information of the Government, were given to the Press with a
perverted meaning and hostile criticism, he hastened to Cairo. He
requested an immediate interview with Tewfik, who excused himself for
what had been done by his Ministers on the ground of his youth; but
General Gordon read the whole situation at a glance, and at once sent
in his resignation, which was accepted. It is not probable that, under
any circumstances, he would have been induced to return to the Soudan,
where his work seemed done, but he certainly was willing to make
another attempt to settle the Abyssin