time to-day to collecting the sum of the evidence as to Gordon's position, which appears to me to be strangely underrated by some.... Undoubtedly I can be no party to the proposed despatch, as a first step, of a brigade to Dongola. I do not think the evidence as to Gordon's position requires or justifies, in itself, military preparations for the contingency of a military expedition. There are, however, preparations, perhaps, of various kinds which might be made, and which are matters simply of cost, and do not include necessary consequences in point of policy. To these I have never offered an insuperable objection, and the adoption of them might be, at the worst, a smaller evil than the evils with which we are threatened in other forms. This on what I may call my side. On the other hand, I hope I may presume that, while we are looking into the matters I have just indicated, nothing will be done to accelerate a Gordon crisis until we see, in the early days of next week, what the Conference crisis is to produce." GORDON'S OWN MEDITATIONS (1884). =Source.=--_General Gordon's Journal_, pp. 46, 56, 59, 93, 112. (_Kegan Paul._) _September 17._--Had Zobeir Pasha been sent up when I asked for him, Berber would in all probability never have fallen, and one might have made a Soudan Government in opposition to the Mahdi. We choose to refuse his coming up because of his antecedents _in re_ slave trade; granted that we had reason, yet as we take no precautions as to the future of these with respect to the slave trade, the above opposition seems absurd. I will not send up A. because he will do this, but will leave the country to B., who will do exactly the same. _September 19._--I was engaged in a certain work--_i.e._, to take down the garrisons, etc. It suited me altogether to accept this work (when once it was decided on to abandon the Soudan), which, to my idea, is preferable to letting it be under those wretched effete Egyptian Pashas. Her Majesty's Government agreed to send me. It was a mutual affair; they owe me positively nothing, and I owe them nothing. A member of Parliament, in one of our last received papers, asked "whether officers were not supposed to go where they were ordered?" I quite agree with his view, but it cannot be said I was ordered to go. The subject was too complex for any order. It was, "Will you go and try?" and my answer was, "Only too delighted." As for all that may be said of our holding out, etc., etc., it is all twaddle, for we had no option; as for all that may be said as to why I did not escape with Stewart, it is simply because the people would not have been such fools as to have let me go, so there is an end of those great-coats of self-sacrifice, etc. I must add _in re_ "the people not letting me go," that even if they had been willing for me to go, I would not have gone, and left them in their misery.