It is a not altogether curious fact that, although Gordon was one of the very ablest leaders and organisers of men, and although he, shortly after thirty, proved to demonstration that he possessed most of the qualities of a great soldier, his native country didn’t appear to have any use for him, or at least no adequate use. As I have said before, the curse of both our Services, and therefore, in a very definite and practical sense, of the whole Empire, is officialism, or officialdom. Two very different men grasped this fact in its relation to Gordon. One was Nubar Pasha, Egyptian Minister at Constantinople, and the other was John Ruskin. Nubar said: “England owes little to her officials; she owes her greatness to men of different stamp.” Ruskin said practically the same thing in one of his lectures at Woolwich, but in different fashion and in many more words, while Gordon, within a mile or so of the lecture-hall at Woolwich, was bending his great soul to the routine duties which appear to have been about the best work that the British Government could find for him to do. When the British Government did at last get him to take his share in the doing of the most difficult and dangerous work which was just then necessary to be done upon the very outskirts of civilisation, those who were responsible for the exercise of the executive power deserted him and left him to his death by what is probably the basest and most criminal betrayal of a man of deeds by men of words that can be laid to the charge of a British Government. History will probably say with truth that every member of that fatally futile Cabinet who had any hand in sending Gordon to Khartoum and neglecting to give him reasonable support incurred a direct and personal responsibility for his death, from which the dispassionate verdict of Posterity will be very slow to relieve their memories. It is a stain that can never pass away from their public reputations. There are other faults of a similar sort for which these men will be arraigned at the bar of History, but the fate of the lonely, betrayed man, who day after day left his starving and ever-diminishing garrison to look out across the desert from the battlements of Khartoum for the help which, for him, never came, will certainly be considered the blackest if not the greatest of them all. But there is another and very practical sense in which Gordon was a British Empire-Maker. This realm of ours is what it is, not only because we have fought for some parts of it and successfully stolen others. It is ours because we knew how to make use of it after we got it; because of all other men now existing on the face of the earth the Anglo-Saxon is the best leader and governor of savage and semi-savage men that has so far been evolved, and of such leaders and governors Gordon plainly proved himself to be one of the very best.