Gordon had already been awarded a brevet lieutenant-colonelcy in the Royal Engineers, so he was now made a Commander of the Bath; but he was as indifferent to English honours as to those of the Chinese. As for Prince Kung's letter to Queen Victoria, we are informed by Mr. Hake that he has good reason to believe it never reached the Queen, but was allowed to remain in a pigeon-hole in the Foreign Office! Well may we quote the words of Axel Oxenstiern to his son, to which the late Prince Consort once referred in a letter to the late Emperor of Germany, at that time Crown Prince of Prussia, "Oh, my son, mark how little wisdom goes to the government of states." Mr. Hake also informs us that when General Gordon presented himself at the War Office, the Secretary of State seemed hardly to have heard his name, and knew nothing of his work in China. Yet this was the man that at the age of thirty had saved from ruin the largest empire of the world! We are indeed a marvellous people. We are always manufacturing sham heroes, and parading them before the world. Yet when we have a real one in our midst we utterly ignore him. When one thinks of the many campaigns in which England has been engaged since the Chinese war was over, the public may well be astonished at a military system which allowed one of its ablest soldiers to live in obscurity, and not even be consulted in the affairs of the nation. Sir William Butler with withering scorn says:-- "Nay, he was almost a stranger in his own land, and, when nearly a generation had passed away, and the fruit of many blunders had accumulated in Egypt a load of disaster that seemed too heavy to be borne, Gordon was at last called from the obscurity in which he had been so long consigned--he was, his own brother has told us, as a person who was now heard of for the first time."