quick to discern it in other men, he was, as a rule, magnificently served. Though an optimist, he suspected enthusiasm; fantasy, rhapsody, and all kinds of unstable exuberance he cordially disliked. Whiggery, inborn and confirmed by his career, convinced him of his right to lead. Lord Rosebery once told him he was ‘a good man to go tiger-shooting with’; but perhaps in other adventures he was a better leader than colleague, his strength of purpose presenting, as was said of him, ‘a rather granitic surface to persuasion’. But he was no Cato to champion causes well lost, and, at his own moment, he could be the soul of reasonable compromise; and he was always confident that past experience of his loyalty, which never defrauded a subordinate of credit due, would reassure those whom he might be compelled to sacrifice for the time being. His air of conscious superiority and his habitual disinclination for small talk made him appear somewhat difficult of approach; but ‘le Grand Ours’, as Cairene society nicknamed its master, could be genial enough and keenly appreciate cultivated converse and both humour and wit.
He was British agent and consul-general, with plenipotentiary diplomatic rank, the junior of the other similarly accredited representatives of the powers; but as representative of the one power occupying the country in force, he was de facto to impose the British will. To be a tyrant were easy; to be aught else than a failure would tax all the talents. He began in an evil hour. A summer of epidemic cholera had bared the nakedness of the land and its leaders. He found Charles Clifford Lloyd [q. v.] established as ‘inspector-general of reforms’, compromising the whole situation by futile attacks on the jealous ministry of the interior, and dissipating what local cordiality had been bred by the Dufferin report. Two days before Baring landed, the hapless William Hicks [q. v.] had set forth to perish (5 November) at Shekan, near el-Obeid, and the news of his catastrophe arrived soon afterwards.
The year-old revolt in the Sudan had suddenly passed beyond Egyptian capacity of control. Baring did not grasp yet the full significance of the Hicks disaster, for he could still indite to Lord Granville a forecast of a speedy reduction of the British garrison and its withdrawal to Alexandria, and promise a politique de replâtrage on Dufferin lines; but he did see at once that it raised a most serious question of finance. Was Egypt to cripple herself still further by undertaking other adventures of this sort? Avoidance of bankruptcy was his first commandment; and his reason and experience forbade increase of taxation as a means. The Egyptian ministers, blind to inevitable consequences, were eager to throw the little good money they had after the bad already sunk in the Sudan. Such waste Baring decided must at all hazards be prevented. A characteristic request for instructions, which he himself dictated in the second part of the telegram, went to London to be answered promptly by orders to ‘advise’ the government of Egypt to withdraw for a time from the Sudanese provinces. The pride of the pashas was outraged; the prime minister resigned; the khedive protested. But, as Lord Milner said, Baring, when his mind was made up, intervened ‘with an emphasis which broke down all resistance’. It was his first grave intervention, and he clinched it by procuring from Lord Granville the famous dispatch which defined what the occupying power intended should be understood by its representative's ‘advice’ on all occasions. One concession he made, however, and this he had cause to regret. He allowed Valentine Baker [q. v.] to undertake with a raw gendarmerie the ignominious Suakin expedition which faltered and failed at el-Teb.
To prescribe withdrawal was one thing; to withdraw another. Some garrisons and civilians in the equatorial region were known to be already shut in. The rest could not leave safely without efficient organization and leading. The political question about the Sudan had made much noise; the practical problem was widely canvassed. British responsibility, which had been disclaimed for Hicks, by what Baring held then and later to be a criminal error, could not be ignored for a result of British ‘advice’. Little was known at Cairo, and less in London, about actual conditions in the Sudan. The popular name of General Charles George Gordon [q. v.], who had served in various parts of the world since the termination of his governorship of the Sudan in 1879, was suggested to ministers. Baring knew little of him except by report; but he suspected an embodiment of much that he admired—courage, magnetism, military genius—and of more that he disliked—fantasy, fanaticism, action on impulse. He had an alternative in his mind—an Egyptian ex-governor, whose fortunes would entail less British responsibility—and twice he refused to agree to Gordon.
22
