Again and again, in those days, Forster would come over to Leeds to see me, to talk about Gordon, or he would ask me to his own house in order to discuss the same topic. The fascination which it had for him was extraordinary. If Gordon had been his own brother he could not have been more deeply interested in his fate. When at last the end of the long tragedy came, and the news reached England of the failure of the expedition to Khartoum, and Gordon's death, Forster was affected by it in the keenest manner. He could hardly speak when he came to me to discuss the fatal tidings, and he was full of theories as to the possibility of Gordon having escaped, after all, from his enemies. Apparently he could not bring himself to accept the truth. It was strange to see this great, powerful man, who had passed through so many years of fierce conflict on his own account, broken down by sorrow for one of whom he had comparatively little personal knowledge, but whose character and fate appealed to all that was best and truest in his nature. Looking back upon my years of friendship with Forster, there are no incidents that touch my sympathies more keenly than those which relate to his heartfelt grief for Gordon, the great victim of ministerial muddling and administrative incapacity. Everybody knows that Forster was the reverse of a Little Englander. In the days when Mr. Chamberlain was still the parochial politician, and the Manchester School a power in the land, Forster never lost an opportunity of trying to inspire his fellow-countrymen with the sense of the greatness of their Imperial position, and of the duties which it imposed upon them. As founder of the Imperial Federation League, he put himself at the head of those English statesmen whose names will be identified with the union of Great Britain and her Colonies in the Empire which we know to-day. He got very little help from the leading politicians on either side. Mr. Chamberlain, who now talks as though the foundation-stone of the Empire was laid in the suburbs of Birmingham, gave him no aid at all, nor did the active spirits of the Opposition. It seemed as though most of his old colleagues and opponents regarded Forster's strenuous advocacy of Imperial Federation as an attempt on his part to keep his name before the public eye. There was one rising young politician, however, who took a different view of Forster's action, and who not only sympathised with his motives, but threw himself into the cause of which he was the leader. This was Lord Rosebery, and to him and to Forster belongs the lion's share of the credit for the creation and development of that sense of Imperial unity which is to-day so great a factor in the life of the Empire.