message from Gordon
showed that the hour when any aid would be useful had almost expired.
This was the passage, dated 13th December, in the last (sixth) volume
of the Journal, but the substance of which reached Lord Wolseley by
one of Gordon's messengers at Korti on 31st December:--

"We are going to send down the _Bordeen_ the day after to-morrow,
and with her I shall send this Journal. _If some effort is not
made before ten days' time the town will fall._ It is
inexplicable this delay. If the Expeditionary forces have reached
the river and met my steamers, one hundred men are all that we
require just to show themselves.... Even if the town falls under
the nose of the Expeditionary forces it will not in my opinion
justify the abandonment of Senaar and Kassala, or of the
Equatorial Province by H.M.'s Government. All that is absolutely
necessary is for fifty of the Expeditionary force to get on board
a steamer and come up to Halfiyeh, and thus let their presence be
felt. This is not asking much, but it must happen _at once_, or
it will (as usual) be too late."

The motives which induced Mr Gladstone's Government to send General
Gordon to the Soudan in January 1884 were, as has been clearly shown,
the selfish desire to appease public opinion, and to shirk in the
easiest possible manner a great responsibility. They had no policy at
all, but they had one supreme wish, viz. to cut off the Soudan from
Egypt; and if the Mahdi had only known their wishes and pressed on,
and treated the Khartoum force as he had treated that under Hicks,
there would have been no garrisons to rescue, and that British
Government would have done nothing. It recked nothing of the grave
dangers that would have accrued from the complete triumph of the
Mahdi, or of the outbreak that must have followed in Lower Egypt if
his tide of success had not been checked as it was single-handed by
General Gordon, through the twelve months' defence of Khartoum. Still
it could not quite stoop to the dishonour of abandoning these
garrisons, and of making itself an accomplice to the Mahdi's
butcheries, nor could it altogether turn a deaf ear to the
representations and remonstrances of even such a puppet prince as the
Khedive Tewfik. England was then far more mistress of the situation at
Cairo than she is now, but a helpless refusal to discharge her duty
might have provoked Europe into action at the Port