Page:The Siege of London - Posteritas - 1885.djvu/16

 who had come into office strongly pledged to peace, and "whose whole policy was tinged with Quakerism and "Peace at any price" went out of their way to shed the blood of the Soudanese like water. The burning sands of the desert were sodden with the blood of these wretched people, whose only crime was that, with fanatical enthusiasm, they were struggling for their freedom. But an Egyptian army of 10,000 men, under the command of a distinguished English commander,, marching against the rebels by consent of the English Government, had been caught in ambuscade and slaughtered, and that deed had to be revenged, in spite of the fact that General Hicks and his army had no right to have been sent to the Soudan at all. All this slaughter, however, and the unspeakable suffering and misery that followed in its train, effected no purpose, beyond proving the magnificent valour of the Arabs and the splendid fighting powers of the British soldier. The Mahdi's power was not crushed; the British troops were ordered to retire, and garrison after garrison in the Soudan were given over to rapine and slaughter.

At length, in sheer despair, the Gladstone Cabinet sent a very notable and illustrious Englishman, whose name will live in history as long as the world shall last, into the Soudan, on a solitary mission, the success of which was, absolutely dependent on the unique genius and remarkable mental power of one man. General Gordon was a wonderful man, and the Liberals hoped that he would effect wonderful things. So he would have done, in all probability, had he been adequately supported, but the fatuous policy of the English Government was still pursued, and the voice of Birmingham was allowed to make itself heard above the Imperial voice of an Empire upon which the sun was said never to set.

General Gordon went into the desert on his grand and lonely mission, and then the silence and the mystery of the desert set its seal upon his movements for months. Then other and equally absorbing events attracted the attention of the country. In all parts of the world the Government were making grave blunders. The social fabric of the Indian Empire had been shaken to its foundations by the remarkably short-sighted and sentimental policy of the