TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE FALL OF KHARTOUM. THE FALL OF KHARTOUM. THE fall of Khartoum is a grave misfortune for this country in two ways. It will indirectly increase the Mandi's power, and it will directly increase the burden of contending with that power. The fighting strength of the False Prophet is derived entirely from the Arab belief that he is either the expected Messenger from on high, or the forerunner of that Messenger ; and the first proof of his mission, demanded by tradition no less than by Mussulman opinion, is success. If he is God's man, God will give him victory,— that is the rooted belief of every Mussulman in the world. Now, he has himself struck but twice ; and each time he has been conspicuously victorious. His agents have been defeated here and there,—at El Teb, at Abou Klea, and again on the road to Metemmeh ; but he himself has never been even repulsed. He directed the attack on Hicks Pasha, and the army of Hicks Pasha was annihilated ; he organised, pressed, and at last superintended, the siege of Khartoum, and Khartoum is in his hands. That it was captured by " treachery " makes a great difference to us, but none to Arabs, who hold that a Prophet's weapons are the sword and conversion ; and that a Mussulman who betrayed an infidel to the Mandi is not a treacherous Mussulman, but a Mussulman who has been converted to the truth. The high character of the infidel chief, his long resistance, the defeat of so many scattered Arab divisions, the near approach of the white army floating up in countless boats, all this will only deepen the idea of something miraculous in the ultimate surrender of Khartoum, and therefore deepen the confidence in the Mandi's claim. From henceforward there will be no resistance to him in the Soudan, until he is personally defeated ; and whether we advance to Khartoum, or make a stand at Berber, or fall back on Wady Haifa, and the defence of Egypt Proper, we shall have to contend with a leader who disposes of the whole strength of the Soudan, and who can expend a division in vain, or lose a year in a siege, without shattering his own power. To attack such a man in such a stronghold as he will make of Khartoum, where already he has mounted guns which drove back British steamers, will be a most serious enterprise, while the power of the Mandi in attack has also become formidable. He has now nothing behind him to dread, and can send forward his lieutenants to attack Gubat or strengthen Metemmeh with any number of men for whom he can find munitions and commissariat. He is nearly certain to do this ; and, although General Wolseley is reported to be full of confidence, and though Arabs will hardly storm entrenchments defended by British soldiers, the position is still full of causes for anxiety. General Wolseley is fettered in striking his blows by the desert and by the river ; by the desert, which, in the absence of sufficient camels, can only be crossed in detachments—even Sir Redvers Buller having divided his command into two— and by the river, which, though it can be ascended by any number of men, limits advance to six or seven miles a day. Lord Wolseley has plenty of men for a great struggle at Gubat, or even for an advance on Khartoum ; but they are terribly separated by desert and river. There are nearly 1,000 at Gubat, 1,000 more under Sir Redvers Buller crossing the Bayuda Desert to reinforce Gubat, 2,500 more with the General at Korti, and 2,500 more under General Earle creeping by water up to Abou Hamad, which it is indispensable to seize in order to open communication with Korosko, and therefore with Egypt, by the quickest route,—the one across which General Gordon rode. Lord Wolseley has, therefore, 7,000 in all ; but of these, General Earle's 2,500 are not available, being five weeks' distance by boat from Gubat, and 2,500 more at Korti have still to cross the Desert, with its difficulties as to water and camels, in detachments. That he will succeed in strengthening Gubat sufficiently, and so gaining time for England to arrive at a decision, we do not doubt ; but all supplies from Khartoum are cut off, and with only one steamer left, to provision 4,500 men in a country where every native will be a fanatic enemy, and where supplies can be removed into an inaccessible interior, will be most anxious and exhausting work. The General is full of resource, the troops are hardened with work, and the sea, to which every Englishman looks instinctively for succour, is, after all, only three hundred miles off ; but it is vain to deny that the Expedition is indefinitely worse situated than it was upon January 19th.
That Gubat and the force there must be saved is a point beyond discussion ; but whether, once gathered there in strength, General Wolseley should wait reinforcements, and then recover Khartoum, or should retire from the Soudan, we must leave to the decision of the Government. The arguments, moral and political, are, as we conceive them, nearly equal for either course. As we are openly at war with the Mandi, who struck us both at Tamasai and Abou Klea, when we were only marching to rescue an imprisoned garrison ; as he avowedly threatens a people we are bound to protect ; and as we must fight him somewhere, there is no moral objection to. fighting him at Khartoum. He does not claim the Soudan alone, which we have determined to abandon, and for which, therefore, any fighting would be waste of blood, but the whole Mussulman world, and especially the Red Sea on both sides, which we must defend, and Egypt, which we are bound by solemn promises to protect. If, therefore, it is felt that Khartoum can be and must be retaken, we may as well fight there as anywhere else, even if by fighting there we cannot rescue General Gordon, who, if alive, is doubtless held as a hostage to be exchanged for military or political advantages. On the other hand, we confess we view continued fighting in the Soudan for a city we do not intend to keep, and against clans with whom, if they would leave Egypt alone, we should have no quarrel, with a kind of disgust. Why should we waste our civilised and trained citizens, or why should we slaughter those brave barbarians ? If General Gordon is to be rescued by storming Khartoum, there is an end of discussion ; but if he is not, what is the sense of spending life and treasure on a work which could be more effectively, as well as more easily, done six hundred miles nearer home ? Our military honour is not concerned, for we have not suffered any defeat, and the interest we have at stake, the necessity of not allowing a barbarian prophet to reawaken the whole Mussulman world is, when English lives are in the balance, of a somewhat shadowy kind. As to the comparative difficulty of the two plans, there can be but one opinion, for as against Khartoum we fight without a base, while at Wady Haifa we are in direct communication with the sea. Still, we can easily imagine that there are considerations known to the Government, such as the state of feeling in the Mussulman world, and the danger of insurrection in Egypt itself, and perhaps agreements with Italy of vast importance, which make the recapture of Khartoum imperative ; and in that case we have nothing to say except that, at any cost of time or money, success should be assured. We do not object to the policy of working with small forces and picked men, and relying on audacity as well as strength, for we conquered India so ; but there are occasions on which we should leave nothing uncertain, and strike, not only as a daring Power, but as a Power of almost limitless material resources. We would attack Khartoum, if at all, from the South as well as the North, and from Bombay as well as from Cairo, and never leave ultimate victory for one week uncertain.
As to the other question which partisans are raising, of the conduct of Government in the matter, we hardly see how it arises. The Cabinet deliberately selected what they thought the best time ; they picked-out the ablest General, they followed his advice as to the route,—partly, it is believed, against their own opinion,—and in the opinion of General Gordon, as well as of the world, they were admirably successful. The very last message from the imprisoned General exhibited the highest confidence in his own unexhausted resources. They had no reason to suspect a treachery which he did not suspect ; and they might have been baffled by it in December as easily as in January. They have been beaten by Providence or events, and not by any failure of their own, and might just as well be held responsible if General Gordon had died of cholera, and his garrison, out of heart at his death, had submitted to the enemy. We detest this tendency to desert the unsuccessful because of non-success, and are bewildered by the malice which can choose such a moment as this for attacking General Wolseley, because, forsooth, he, with his whole future at stake, deliberately selected a route which Ismail, the ex-Khedive, and the man who in all the world best knows Egypt, affirmed to be the only one even possible. He succeeded, moreover, though his success has been made useless, and to quote a misfortune which could not have been prevented by human agency as proof that he is unfit is malignant folly. General Wolseley is no friend of ours, nor did we contend for the Nile route ; but he is the most resourceful General in the service, and should be sustained in his bad hour even more strongly than in his day of triumph. Are we once more to supersede a Wellington by a Baird ; or, if not, what is the purpose of pouring calumnies on the leader we intend to retain MR, GOSCHEN ON LIBERAL HOME POLICY.
1%R. GOSCHEN'S first speech at Edinburgh—the speech of last Saturday—was a very successful apology for the elder Liberalism, at least in its relation to the equity of its aims and the freedom which it endeavoured to promote. He struck the right note when he said that it is unworthy at the present moment to go to a host of new electors and say to them, "Look what you have suffered in the past ; look how unjust the system is under which you are living ; shift your burdens upon others, and strike at other classes ; push your own class interests ;" and to say this " without a word as to corresponding obligations, without a word to lift them to a high and worthy conception of common national duty, without a word to inspire them with zeal for the union of classes." Undoubtedly even if there be wrongs to be righted, even if there be unjust burdens to be shifted to other shoulders, the right moment for speaking of these wrongs and for shifting these burdens is not the moment when you are imposing a new duty on men who are as yet unaccustomed to the sense of responsibility. Let them feel the responsibility which belongs to power first, and then perhaps you may trust them to use the power well. But to harangue them on the selfish opportunities which the gift of power confers, before you have even hinted at the difficulty of using such power well, and the ignominy of using it solely for a selfish end, is, as Mr. Goschen suggested, to promote the worst possible discharge of the duties of a great Democracy. It is, indeed, merely an instigation to wrench from those who were in power before, the " spoils" of political life. Mr. Goschen, however, hardly did justice to the cause which he intended to advocate when he declared in such unmeasured language against the principle of a progressive Income-tax as absolutely at variance with all the principles of Mr. Gladstone's finance. It is, no doubt, a very dangerous principle, and a principle which we should be exceedingly sorry to see now adopted, or to see adopted at all without the gravest and most elaborate discussion ; nor then unless the conscience of the nation is thoroughly convinced that stringent limits can be laid down within which the principle of graduation is just, and not merely one to be justified by the right of the stronger ; and we doubt gravely whether such limits exist unless they be identical with those which the Legislature has already accepted. Still, it is no use denying the fact that in exempting all incomes under £150 from Income-tax, and still more, in permitting, as Sir Stafford Northcote and his party have taken the lead in doing, men with incomes of not more than £400 a year, to deduct £150, and to pay Income-tax only on the remainder, this principle of graduation, within certain strict limits, has already been sanctioned. So that it is hardly fair to denounce it as a principle wholly inconsistent with the finance of the two great parties, that the poor should pay less, in proportion to their incomes, than the well-to-do pay in proportion to theirs. Put it how we will, it has been assumed by the legislation of both parties that the margin of optional expenditure may properly be more heavily taxed than the necessities of the people. And grave, therefore, as the question is how far this exemption should go, it is not to be reasonably regarded as a question outside the range of legitimate consideration. None the less, Mr. Goschen is right, and will have the conscience of the country at his back, in protesting most warmly against the unfortunate, and, we really think, hardly worthy, attempt to invite an as yet unenfranchis-.d, inexperienced, and wholly-undrilled electorate to count the spoils of a possible financial change the most serious and the most dangerous which could be proposed to the consideration even of the most upright, the wisest, and best-tried Legislature in the world. Mr. Goschen went a little too far in his sweeping denunciation of the principle of the proposed change ; but he at least took the right and the high-minded attitude. He declined to talk of the spoils of war to millions of voters who ought to be rather urged to identify themselves with the voters of the past in consulting for the common good, and even in making sacrifices, if need be, for the common progress of a great nation.
On the subject of the Land-laws, and the establishment of rural municipalities with a large rating-power and great responsibility in the imposition of local burdens, Mr. Goschen's speech was all that we could desire. His chief principle was increase liberty and see how the increase of liberty works, before you begin moulding the policy of the country on the principle of interference.' He was for abolishing all the restrictions which now hamper the free transfer of land from hand to hand. He was eager to see a great deal of land in the
hands of the people, even though it should turn out that the total production of the land should thereby rather be diminished than increased, which was not, however, his own expectation. Ho was warmly in favour of encouraging civic life in the villages and counties, as well as in the towns, as the best possible training for the political life of the nation. He was deeply convinced that the more you leave the local burdens to be imposed by local authorities, the less dangerous your system of taxation will be. " The greatest master on modern finance once told me that many nations had broken down under the burden of imperial taxation, but none had broken down under their local burdens." He augured great things for our local institutions from the progress, thrift, and wisdom of the great friendly societies. He held that even on the subject of the housing of the poor, the first great step was to enforce strictly the responsibilities of owners. In that way, much could be done which would " slip through the fingers of an army of inspectors." And he was anxious to devolve on the Local Governments,—both those already existing, and those to be created,—the duty of so restraining the granting of licences to sell intoxicating liquors. as to secure the general welfare of the locality, without interfering with individual liberty. He entirely disapproved of the principle of prohibition ; but insisted that the Local Authority should decide for the community at large how far the restriction of licences, in the interests of order, should go. The only points on which Mr. Goschen took what may be called a Conservative view of this class of questions, was in opposing the proposal to let the local community acquire land for itself in order to plant the labourer artificially upon it, —a step which he did not think ought even to be thought of until the full effect of the complete liberation of the land from artificial restrictions had been tried ; and again in his resistance to the enactment of what are called the three F.'s,—fair rent; fixity of tenure, free sale,—for England, which he regarded as a " crude panacea," and at all events a very dangerous substitute for the far more effective principle of liberty.
On all these points, with the slight reservation we have mentioned, we go heartily with Mr. Goschen, and hold him to be the true exponent in home policy of the Liberalism of the future. Undoubtedly it is true Liberalism to enforce on the people whom you have enfranchised, scrupulous regard for the rights of others, and the immense danger of a greedy scramble for their own. That way anarchy lies. It may be and is necessary to speak plainly and boldly to a privileged class of the rights they are withholding ; but once you have deprived them of these privileges, it becomes just as much your duty to exhort the people for whom you have conquered their rights, to the conscientious and disinterested discharge of their duties—and this is simply inconsistent with a snatching or even a grasping spirit. We thank Mr. Goschen heartily for interpreting, in statesmanlike language, what we believe to be the true aspirations of English Liberals ; and we find in his speech the sort of counsel which, in a period of transition, we believe that the Liberal Party will find at once the wisest and also the most truly inspiring. Englishmen love their rights, but they love still more to assert their rights in the spirit of duty.
Previous page
