. In the flush of the moment,
carried along by an irresistible inclination to do the things which he
saw could be done, he overlooked all the other points of the case, and
especially that he was dealing with politicians tied by their party
principles, and thinking more of the passage through the House of some
domestic measure of fifth-rate importance than of the maintenance of
an Imperial interest and the arrest of an outbreak of Mahommedan
fanaticism which, if not checked, might call for a crusade. Gordon
overlooked all these considerations. He never thought but that he was
dealing with other Englishmen equally mindful with himself of their
country's fame.

If Gordon, long before he took up the task, had been engrossed in the
development of the Soudan difficulty and the Mahdi's power, those who
had studied the question and knew his special qualifications for the
task, had, at a very early stage of the trouble, called upon the
Government to avail themselves of his services, and there is no doubt
that if that advice had been promptly taken instead of slowly,
reluctantly, and only when matters were desperate, there is no doubt,
I repeat, remembering what he did later on, that Gordon would have
been able, without a single English regiment, to have strangled the
Mahdi's power in its infancy, and to have won back the Soudan for the
Khedive.

But it may be said, where was it ever prominently suggested that
General Gordon should be despatched to the Soudan at a time before the
Mahdi had become supreme in that region, as he undoubtedly did by the
overthrow of Hicks and his force?

I reply by the following quotations from prominent articles written by
myself in _The Times_ of January and February 1883. Until the capture
of El Obeid at that period the movement of the Mahdi was a local
affair of the importance of which no one, at a distance, could attempt
to judge, but that signal success made it the immediate concern of
those responsible in Egypt. On 9th January 1883, in an article in _The
Times_ on "The Soudan," occurs this passage:--

"It is a misfortune, in the interests of Egypt, of civilisation,
and of the mass of the Soudanese, that we cannot send General
Gordon back to the region of the Upper Nile to complete there the
good work he began eight years ago. With full powers, and with
the assurance that the good fruits of his labours shall not be
lost by the subsequent acts of corrupt Pashas,