ranting personal audience to everyone who wished to
see him, from the lowest miserable and naked peasant to the highest
official or religious personage, like the Shereef Said Hakim, he
reached Khartoum on the 3rd May. He did not delay an hour in the
commencement of his task. His first public announcement was to abolish
the _courbash_, to remit arrears of taxation, and to sanction a
scheme for pumping the river water into the town. The _Kadi_ or mayor
read this address in the public square; the people hailed it with
manifestations of pleasure, and Gordon himself, carried away by his
enthusiasm for his work, compresses the long harangue into a brief
text: "With the help of God, I will hold the balance level."

But the measures named were not attended by any great difficulty in
their inception or execution. They were merely the preliminaries to
the serious and risky disbandment of the Bashi-Bazouks, and the steps
necessary to restrict and control, not merely the trade in, but the
possession of, slaves. As General Gordon repeatedly pointed out, his
policy and proceedings were a direct attack on the only property that
existed in the Soudan, and justice to the slave could not be equitably
dispensed by injustice to the slave-owner. The third class of slave
raider stood in a separate category, and in dealing with him Gordon
never felt a trace of compunction. He had terminated the career of
those ruthless scourges of the African races at the Equator, and with
God's help he was determined to end it throughout the Soudan. But the
slave question in Egypt was many-sided, and bristled with difficulties
to anyone who understood it, and wished to mete out a fair and equable
treatment to all concerned.

It was with the special object of maintaining the rights of the owners
as well as of the slaves that Gordon proposed a set of regulations,
making the immediate registration of slaves compulsory, and thus
paving the way for the promulgation of the Slave Convention already
under negotiation. His propositions were only four in number, and read
as follows:--

1. Enforce the law compelling runaway slaves to return to their
masters, except when cruelly treated.

2. Require masters to register their slaves before 1st January
1878.

3. If the masters neglect to register them, then Regulation 1 not
to be enforced in their favour.

4. No registration to be allowed after 1st January 1878.

By these simple