reduced to £146,000. This was without providing for the army of occupation – another £300,000; but taking credit for £170,000, saved in consequence on the native army and navy. Our boasted financiers have achieved bigger deficits than even Ismail Pasha used to do in his stock-jobbing carnival. They began the year 1882 with Treasury balances of various kinds exceeding £400,000. They ended the year with a debtor balance of £463,000. The actual deficit, if all its details could be got together, would not fall much short of a million sterling. In 1883 they were more than a million and a quarter to the bad; and last year they anticipated a deficit of nearly half a million. The accumulated deficits of the three years acknowledged by Sir Evelyn Baring are nearly two and three-quarter millions. This, added to the indemnities, which exceed four millions, makes nearly seven millions sterling piled on to the Egyptian debt as the result of three years of British administration. With commendable foresight Earl Granville proposes to make the deficiency loan nine millions, there being reason to fear that an equilibrium of receipts and expenditure has not yet been arrived at. It is a wonderful feat in finance, a truly heroic lesson for the fellaheen in self-government. And if they do not relish it, they may console themselves with the thought that our generous assistance in running them into debt another nine millions will, before we see the end of it, cost us perhaps fifty millions. The burden of the tragedy may not be so unequally divided, after all – nine millions to Egypt and fifty millions to us. But it is costly statesmanship. If Mr Gladstone had bestowed half the attention on the Dual Note of January 1882 that he was then giving to obstruction, he would have saved his own country and Egypt money enough to buy every farm in Ireland under five acres, and make a clean present of it to the tenant. While he was gagging the House of Commons, Egypt was hurrying to her ruin, bombarded by his "friendly" ironclads, invaded by his "friendly" armies, reduced to bankruptcy by his "friendly" Controllers, and abandoned at last to the tender mercies of "friendly" bondholders.
Alas! bad as it is, that is not the bitterest drop in this cup of national sorrow and humiliation. It is only when we stand in imagination, with uncovered heads and grief -stricken hearts, beside the unknown grave of Gordon, that we realise the full evil of our "meddling and muddling" on the Nile. General Gordon, the oriflamme of our Christian chivalry, dead! – assassinated by the dagger of some cowardly traitor! – sacrificed on the foul altar of stock-jobbery and cool-blooded statecraft! It is more than this country will endure. Ministerial apologists may palliate the disgrace as they may, and the Caucus may rally all its soulless forces to shield the Government from just punishment, but their hour of doom has struck. The civilised world has passed sentence on them without a single dissenting voice, and posterity will indorse the verdict through all the ages that are to come. Their own official correspondence, mutilated and carefully edited as it is, fixes on them the responsibility of Gordon's fate. Twelve months ago they made an appeal to him, which practically asked him for ninety-nine in a hundred chances of his life. They left him for himself but one poor chance in a hundred; and did they, as men of honour, as Englishmen, as Christians, do all that in them lay
