GENERAL GORDON'S CHANGE OF POLICY.
ACORRESPONDENT, who writes as an admirer of Gordon, protests against " the injustice" which, in his opinion, we have done to General Gordon on a variety of points. Let us take our censor's points and compare them with the facts as they are stated, not only in Gordon's Journal, but in the Parliamentary Papers, which Mr. Denison does not appear to have read. Let us take first the policy of abandon- ing the Soudan. On his way to Egypt Gordon wrote a memorandum of his views on the Soudan, which he sent home to her Majesty's Government. After reviewing the whole situation, he concluded that the Government were " fully justified" in insisting on the abandonment of the country by Egypt, " inasmuch as the sacrifices necessary towards securing a good government would be far too onerous to admit of such an attempt being made. Indeed, one may say it is impracticable. At any cost, her Majesty's Government will now leave them as God has placed them ; they are not bound to fight among themselves, and they will no longer be oppressed by men coming from lands so remote as Circassia, Kurdistan, and Anatolia." At Gordon's request his lieutenant, Colonel Stewart, gave his opinion on Gordon's policy. " I quite agree with General Gordon," says Stewart, " that the Soudan is an expensive and useless possession. No one who has visited it can escape the reflection, What a useless posses- sion is this land, and what a huge encumbrance on Egypt.' " On reaching Cairo, Gordon's instructions, drawn up under his own direction, were read over to him by Sir E. Baring, who reports as follows :—" He expressed to me his entire concur- rence in the instructions. The only suggestion he made was in connection with the passage in which, speaking of the policy of abandoning the Soudan, I had said, I understand also that you entirely concur in the desirability of adopting this policy.'
General Gordon wished that I should add the words and that you [Gordon] think that it should on no account be changed.'
These words were accordingly added." The abandonment of the Soudan was therefore the policy which Gordon insisted "should on no account be changed." We say that Gordon himself changed it fundamentally. Mr. Denison contradicts us. How then does he interpret the " Notice " which Gordon pub- lished in the streets of Khartoum, and which is reproduced in his Journal? " Formerly," said this Notice, "the Government had decided to transport the Egyptians down to Cairo, and abandon the Soudan ; and in fact some of them had been sent down during the time of Hussein Pasha Yusri, as you your- selves saw. On our arrival at Khartoum we, on account of pity for you, and in order not to let your country be destroyed, communicated with the Khedive of Egypt, our Effendi, con- cerning the importance and the inexpediency of abandoning it. Whereupon the orders for abandoning the Soudan were cancelled; and serious attention was directed towards smothering the disturbances and driving away the disturbers Be, therefore, fully reassured as to yourselves and your families, and all your possessions in your houses, taking no heed of what has occurred in the past." And he goes on to promise " that if Mohammed Achmet should call upon me for three years to surrender Khartoum, I will not listen to him, but will pro- tect your lives and families and possessions with all energy and stedfastness." Yet, in spite of this very solemn promise, Gordon calmly writes in his Journal (p. 51) :—" I certainly will, with all my heart and soul, do nay best, if any of her Majesty's forces come up here or to Berber, to send them down before January, and will willingly take all the onus of having done so. Truly the people are not worth any great sacrifice, and we are only bound to them because of our dubious conduct in Egypt, to which bond there is a limit, which I fix in January." What does Mr. Denison say to that I
Nor was this the only fundamental change of policy exhibited by General Gordon at Khartoum. The plain truth is that he had no fixed policy at all. He was hardly of the same mind for two weeks, for two days, consecutively. Take, for instance, his policy as to Zubair. In the memorandum already quoted Gordon says :—" My idea is that the restoration of the country should be made to the different petty Sultans who existed at the time of Mehemet Ali's conquest, and whose families still exist ; that the Mandi should be left altogether out of the calculation as regards the handing over the country ; and that it should be optional with the Sultans to accept his supremacy or not." After writing this, Gordon heard that the Egyptian Government had an idea of employing Znbair at Suakim, and he immediately protests as follows :—" My objection to Zubair is this ; he is a first-rate General, and a man of great capacity, and he would in no time eat up all the petty Sultans and consolidate a vast State, as his ambition is boundless. I would therefore wish him kept away, as his restoration would be not alone unjust, but might open up the Turco-Arabic question. Left independent, the Sultans will doubtless fight among themselves, and one will try to annex the other ; but with Zubair it would be an easy task to over- come those different States, and form a large independent one." Colonel Stewart, who knew the Soudan and Zubair well, con-
firms Gordon's opinion Zubair's return," he says, " would undoubtedly be a misfortune to the Soudanese, and also a direct encouragement to the slave-trade. As he would be by far the ablest leader in the Soudan, he would easily overturn the newly- elected political edifice, and become a formidable power." This was written on the way to Khartoum. Yet one of Gordon's first acts on reaching Khartoum was to demand the immediate appointment of Zubair as his own successor as Governor-General of the Soudan in the first instance, and as its permanent ruler eventually. And this appointment Zubair was to receive, on Gordon's recommendation, " direct from her Majesty's Government," which was, moreover, to give this unparalleled scoundrel " a promise of moral support," with the Christian knighthood of St. Michael and St. George. What would Mr. Denison have said if Mr. Gladstone, after all his de- nunciations of Ohefket Pasha, had recommended his appoint- ment as Governor-General of Bulgaria, with " a promise of moral support," a Christian knighthood, a lump sum of £500,000, and £200,000 a year, all out of the pockets of the British tax- payers V Yet Chefket Pasha's infamies, atrocious as they were, pale into insignificance when compared with the iniquities of Zubair Pasha in the Soudan. And Gordon recommended this piece of what we should call portentous wickedness, because it would save that thing which wears such different aspects to different men, and in whose name so many iniquities have been perpetrated,—" Honour." General Gordon's final plan was to make Zabair a present of the garrisons, with all the steamers and munitions of war. And so far was he from " leaving the Mahal altogether out of the calculation as regards the handing over of the country," that he formally appointed him Sultan of Kordofan. It was when the maiiai rejected this offer with scorn, and invited General Gordon to become a Mussulman and accept service under him as a dervish, that the General substituted the policy of "smashing the Mandi" for the policy of evacuation. Mr. Denison pleads that Gordon was permitted by the Govern- ment to retain the garrisons " for such reasonable period" as he " might think necessary, in order that the abandonment of the country might be accomplished with the least possible risk of life and property." But this permission was granted in response to a question from Gordon, namely,—" What should be done should the Mandi's adherents attack the evacuating columns ? It cannot be supposed that these are to offer no resistance, and if in resisting they should obtain a success, it would be bat reasonable to allow them to follow up the Mandi to such a position as would ensure their future safe march. This is one of those difficult questions which our Govern- ment can hardly be expected to answer, but which may arise, and to which I would call attention." General Gordon was accordingly allowed the discretionary use of the troops in self- defence, to which Mr. Denison appeals. But it was obviously limited to the contingency of the evacuating garrisonabeing at- tacked on the march to Egypt. General Gordon was forbidden to employ the garrisons for the purpose of setting up any form of government in the Soudan. " It will, of course, be fully understood," say his instructions, "that the Egyptian troops are not to be kept in the Soudan merely with a view to consoli- dating the power of the new rulers of the country." Yet General Gordon pledged his own honour and that of his Government to the very thing which his instructions formally prohibited. " I have named men to different places," he says, " thus involving them with the Mandi ; how could I look the world in the face if I abandoned them and fled ?" Even as regards the question of evacuation, he went altogether beyond the scope of his instruc- tions. His instructions empowered him, as far as it was feasible, to evacuate the Egyptian garrisons and civil employes. Gordon, after a time, enlarged. this into : "Every Every one in the Soudan, captive or hemmed in, ought to have the option or power of retreat." The rescue of the Mandi's prisoners at El Obeid was thus embraced in Gordon's plan of evacuation ; it fol- lowed, in fact, from the policy of " smashing the ilfandi." Does not all this completely establish the points which Mr. Denison disputes ? We have heard from other sources that General Gordon and Colonel Stewart differed seriously about Gordon's policy, and this is confessed in Gordon's Journal (pp. 288-9). " Stewart," he says, " knew everything, and could tell her Majesty's Govern- ment the pros and cons from their point of view, and with feelings akin to theirs, which they would accept from Stewart; and. never without suspicion from me (in which they are justified, for I do not look at things from their point of view)." And he goes on to say that he had full confidence that Colonel Stewart would " honourably " tell the Govern- ment General Gordon's opinion while conscientiously stating his own. One thing has greatly surprised: us, both in General Gordon's Journal and in his despatches, and that is the extraordinary vacillation of judgment and of his impres- sions as to men and things which he displays. At one time he enormously overrates the strength of the forces arrayed against him ; at another time he absurdly underrates them. He asks for two hundred British troops to gallop from Suakim to Berber— across a desert which he has himself described as one, of the most awful in the world, with scarcely any water—as if it were a mere canter in Rotten Row. He declares, in September, that he " would not hesitate himself to ride down with three hundred men from Khartoum to Debbeh," having first squared the Kababish tribe. "I cannot too much impress on you [i.e., on Lord Wolseley] that this expedition will not encounter any enemy worth the name in a European sense of the word." He gives it as his opinion, founded on" experience," that Wolseley's force would. only have " three fights, coating each. eight killed and fifteen wounded." If the first fight was "a good one, and there was a good pursuit," there would be an end of all' further resistance; ; "all the rest will be child's play." Abu Klee and the subsequent fights told a very different. tale. We must, in conclusion, point out one important fact to those who accuse Mr. Gladstone's Government of cowardice in " abandoning " General Gordon. It is easy to be brave by, proxy; easy to earn a claptrap reputation for courage at the cost of others. It was not Mr. Gladstone or his colleagues who would suffer by the despatch of an expedition to Khar- toum. The sufferers would be the ten thousand gallant soldiers who formed the expedition, and their relatives at home. And we do not hesitate to say that it would have been criminal on the part of the Government to send such an. exi- pedition till they were certain that it was absolutely necessary. In one of General Gordon's last telegrams before he was shut up in Khartoum he said that he " considered himself free to act according to circumstances," and would retire to the Equator if he failed to " suppress the rebellion." And down to the de- parture of the relief expedition, General Gordon's own brother, an experienced soldier, declared his belief that General Gordon was quite safe, and could retreat to the Equator whenever he liked. Sir Henry publicly ridiculed the idea of his brother being, in any danger. Surely the Government was justified, under the circumstances, in not acting with rash precipitation. And it must be borne in mind, after all, that Khartoum fell by the treachery of a man whom General Gordon, with singular ignorance of human nature, placed in a position of trust after discovering his treachery, while at the same time threatening him with punishment when the British Army arrived. Is it to be wondered at that when the British troops were within striking, distance of Khartoum, the traitor came to the conclu- sion that it was a question of General Gordon's life or his own, and acted accordingly ? On the whole, we must repeat that those who challenge a critical examination of General Gordon's doings and sayings at Khartoum do a very ill service to their hero.
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