Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/14

viii miles beyond it spreads a fair and fruitful tract of country, worth defending and easier to defend, which was once in possession of the owners of Assuân and Wady Haifa. The sight and knowledge of these three things must impress even the most careless or prejudiced of English observers. The truth becomes plain to him, perhaps, for the first time that what was done by Mr. Gladstone's Government in obedience to the real or supposed exigencies of the military and financial situation in 1884, was to compel Egypt to abandon a richly fertile and readily defensible district, in order to draw an essentially arbitrary and unnatural frontier across a long and narrow strip of well-nigh worthless river-valley, whose inhabitants it is, from that position, almost impossible to protect.

The doubts which exercise the patriotic minds of Mr. Labouchere and his party as