but practical arrangements General Gordon would have
upheld the rights of the slave-owners, and thus disarmed their
hostility, at the same time that he stopped the imposition of
servitude on any fresh persons. In the course of time, and without
imposing on the Exchequer the burden of the compensation, which he saw
the owners were in equity entitled to, he would thus have put an end
to the slave trade throughout the Soudan.

The Anglo-Egyptian Convention on the subject of the slave trade,
signed on 4th August 1877, was neither so simple nor so practical,
while there was a glaring inconsistency between its provisions and the
Khedivial Decree that accompanied it.

The second article of the Convention reads: "Any person engaged in
traffic of slaves, either directly or indirectly, shall be considered
guilty of stealing with murder (_vol avec meurtre_)," and consequently
punishable, as General Gordon assumed, with death.

But the first and second clauses of the Khedive's Decree were to a
different effect. They ran as follows:--

"The sale of slaves from family to family will be prohibited.
This prohibition will take effect in seven years in Cairo, and in
twelve years in the Soudan.

"After the lapse of this term of years any infraction of this
prohibition will be punished by an imprisonment of from five
months to five years."

The literal interpretation of this decree would have left Gordon
helpless to do anything for the curtailment of the slave trade until
the year 1889, and then only permitted to inflict a quite insufficient
punishment on those who broke the law. General Gordon pointed out the
contradiction between the Convention and the Decree, and the
impossibility of carrying out his original instructions if he were
deprived of the power of allotting adequate punishment for offences;
and he reverted to his original proposition of registration, for which
the Slave Convention made no provision, although the negotiators at
Cairo were fully aware of his views and recommendations expressed in
an official despatch three months before that Convention was signed.
To these representations Gordon never received any reply. He was left
to work out the problem for himself, to carry on the suppression of
the slave trade as best he could, and to take the risk of official
censure and repudiation for following one set of instructions in the
Convention in preference to those recorded in the Decree. T