We quite agree with an "Old Liberal," writing in the 'St James's Gazette,' that –
"Contemptible beyond expression it is that any public writer should endeavour to justify months and months of delay on the part of our Government, and to throw blame on Sir Charles Wilson and his brave men for a delay of three days, after a long and weary march through the desert, where he and his heroes had fought more than one desperate battle."
We have long since ceased to wonder at the intricate subtleties of the Prime Minister's mind, and at his marvellous powers of self-persuasion, or at the capacity to swallow of his docile majority in Parliament; but that Mr Gladstone, whose personal influence has survived his proved incapacity to govern only by virtue of his supposed earnestness and honesty of purpose, should have lowered himself by adopting the pitiful stock excuse provided for Ministers by the 'Daily News,' in the "treachery" argument above given, must pass the comprehension of all candid minds.
Our Ministers do not seem to have taken into account the possibility of relief arriving too late to save Gordon, or to have been provided with any policy based on such a contingency. Sir E. Hamley says, in the 'Times' of the 28th Feb.: "Many campaigns have been ill planned, but this is probably the first that was ever based on the certainty of success." The plan, he says, "consisted in hurling a force into the enemy's country as a live shell is hurled from a gun, with no more power of retreat than a shell has." When the news of the fall of Khartoum reached the Government, they were like mariners, whose ship had sunk under them, in an open boat on a stormy sea, without compass or steersman. What they did was to beseech their general to provide them with a policy, and some days were thus wasted in irresolution. What they ought to have done was to telegraph to Lord Wolseley, without the loss of a moment, that Khartoum was to be captured, promising him all the means he might demand for that purpose, but leaving the how and the when to his discretion. It is understood that this was the course finally adopted by the Government, and we are glad to recognise that the measures they are taking are fully adequate to the occasion; but it is surely the very irony of fate that the Minister who capitulated to the Boers, in order to escape "bloodguiltiness" in South Africa, is now obliged to incur what must appear to him the awful guilt of shooting down, in North Africa, thousands of poor blacks, who, he has himself said, are only struggling for their freedom. We are bound to suppose that it is the latitude makes all the difference.
The choice of Suakin as our sea base now is something more than a confession of failure. We can hardly believe that Lord Wolseley made himself responsible for advocating the Nile route preferentially. It would be a sufficient condemnation of the latter to say that Berber, the capture of which must now be our first object, is 1700 miles from our transports at Alexandria, while it is only 260 from our transports at Suakin. There is every reason for believing – supposing operations had been commenced from Suakin at the same date as that on which they were commenced from Alexandria – that the railroad leading from the former place could have been completed for military purposes to a point within eighty miles of Berber by the 1st of December at latest. In
