112 ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND EGYPT. 



At thk period of the struggle, a cry of despair was heard from 

 Colonel Stewart, the Officer in command at Khartoum, where i i,ooo 

 men and women were in imminent danger of being massacred, and 

 their cry being heard in Downing Street, as well as in Cairo, the 

 British Government resolved to send them a deliverer, in the person 

 of the chivalrous General Gordon, but who, alas ! like poor Hicks 

 Pasha, as events proved, abandoned by the Government, faced 

 bravely his doom. 



A more painful episode, whilst a more heroic act, than the defence 

 of Khartoum under General Gordon, the pages of history have not 

 recorded. 



The sad events of that memorable siege, and of the deeply 

 humiliating desertion by the Government of England, of that truly 

 great and good man, is, alas ! too well remembered to require a 

 detailed narrative, but this we must unhesitatingly declare, after a 

 careful study of the whole circumstances of the case, that a heavy 

 responsibility lies on the late principal Advisers of the Crown, for the 

 death of General Gordon, and the wholesale massacre which 

 followed the capture, by treachery, of Khartoum. 



Can anything be more intelligible, or more emphatic than the onus 

 probandi of that responsibility ? 



What are the facts? When Gordon, in January, 1884, chivalrously 

 accepted the great trust of saving Khartoum, he also accepted, with 

 the sanction of the British Government, the appointment, conferred 

 upon him by the Khedive, of Governor-General of the Soudan, and on 

 ' his arrival at Khartoum, i8th February, 1884, he was welcomed with 

 enthusiasm in that capacity, and issued a proclamation to that effect. 



There is no doubt, whatever may have been the original in- 

 structions of the British Government given to General Gordon, or of 

 his original intentions when he accepted the appointment, that when 

 he arrived at Khartoum he considered its safety impossible of 

 accomplishment, so long as the hosts of the Mahdi surrounded him, 

 and that his own troops were not to be relied upon. 



In such an emergency, no wonder that Gordon, early in the year 

 of 1884, appealed earnestly to the British Government for help, and 

 when that was denied him, what wonder is it, that he appealed to the 

 millionaires of England and America, to equip a sufficient force to 

 send to his rescue ? 



This was in the month of April, 1884, and why, at this supreme 

 crisis of danger, the British Government maintained so stoical an 

 indifference to his fate, baffles comprehension. 



