conquest, and anarchy she has undergone in turn, and now she stands on the brink of an Arab invasion, bringing untold atrocities in its train. Poor Egypt! The ten plagues were only the beginning of her troubles.
The Nile has been the grave of many a brilliant reputation: is it to swallow up Mr Gladstone's as it swallowed up Mark Antony's, and as it turned the tide of victory against Napoleon? A triple calamity like the fall of Khartoum, the murder of Gordon, and the isolation of the force that was to rescue him, is no ordinary reverse of arms. Humiliating as were Maiwand and Majuba Hill, this is an event of infinitely greater significance to its victims. It is a disaster suffered with the eyes of the world upon us, and which we cannot escape from by an ignominious convention, as we did from Majuba Hill. Cowardice itself could not lose hold of the Soudan until Gordon has been avenged and Khartoum recovered. The Upper Nile has to be regained if we are to remain in Egypt; and at the very time this catastrophe occurred, we were binding ourselves to remain, by solemn agreement with the European Powers. The very efforts of the Government to find a means of escape from an intolerable position, have fixed them more firmly in the meshes which they have all these years been weaving round themselves. For the fellaheen they have filled up the cup of affliction; but it has been fated that before they leave Egypt they shall fill to overflowing another cup. It will be one even more bitter than the first, and they will hold it to the lips of the British tax-payer. When the heart of the nation has been wrung with shame, and bowed down with sorrow, there will be the blood-money to provide. Moreover, while millions, and it may be tens of millions sterling, are being extracted from impoverished incomes, we shall still ask in vain why we are in Egypt, what we have been fighting for, and what the Ministerial policy was which has stained the Nile with wasted blood from Alexandria to Khartoum?
Great Britain has frequently been engaged in wars which the people followed with patriotic interest, and willingly made sacrifices for. But there was not till Khartoum fell a scintilla of such a feeling in this case. In the past we have fought for ideas which we deemed noble, or for objects which we thought essential to the wellbeing of the empire; but they were always clearly understood. Whatever errors diplomacy may have committed, the aim set before the nation was distinct and popular. Cromwell always knew what he unsheathed the sword for. Neither Chatham nor Pitt nor Palmerston struck blows at random, like a giant hitting in the dark. They required no help from the arts of sophistry and hair-splitting to justify themselves to their countrymen. They did not drift into war, and then discover that it was a heritage of woe from a maligned predecessor. To their honest minds it would have seemed culpably reckless, not to say criminal, to involve their country in bloodshed which was neither war nor peace, attack nor defence. Their first duty in a foreign complication was to have a policy, and to set foot nowhere without having thought out, with all the gravity and care befitting responsible statesmen, what they were to do. Such has never been Mr Gladstone's practice. Wherever the vital issue of peace or war has come before him, he has, to use Mr Goschen's apt phrase, "fumbled his cards." It is not
