Under the British flag he never won a battle for Britain. The genius which his Motherland might have made such splendid use of did its best work under the dragon-flag of China and the crescent-flag of Egypt, but nevertheless on the day when the last mile of the British high road from Cairo to Cape Town is thrown open, and the _Pax Britannica_ is proclaimed from north to south of Africa, men will remember Gordon and confess that without him this might never have been done. It will have been noticed by those who have read between the lines here printed that where Empire-Makers are concerned the old-fashioned idea of ancestry seems to be not altogether the fiction that certain latter-day theorists, men of words to a man, have sought to make it, and Gordon was no exception to this rule. His lineage stretches away back into the dim mists which lie behind the history of all these islands into the days when Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen had yet to be thought of, and when the divisions of mankind were racial rather than national. Of course the Gordons of last century were for the most part desperate Jacobites, and as such were hinderers rather than doers of the work of empire-making. But, curiously enough, this particular Gordon did not come from these. On the contrary, there was a fight during that miserable business of 1745 in which, on the field of Gladsmuir, a couple of thousand Highland clansmen played havoc with some English regiments fresh back from the Flemish wars, and after the slaughter they took many prisoners, one of whom was David Gordon, great-grandfather of the hero and martyr of Khartoum. From this it will be seen that, whether by design or accident, his branch of the ancient and widespread stock had managed to get upon the right side--that is to say, the side which was to fight for imperialism as distinguished from mere nationalism, which in many cases is only another way of spelling parochialism. It is noteworthy, by the way, that Gordon’s grandfather, William Augustus, so named after “Butcher Cumberland,” fought at Louisburg and on the Heights of Abraham, after Captain Cook had taken those soundings on the St. Lawrence. His son, William Henry, fought as an officer of artillery at Maida, and it was his grandson who won the yellow jacket and mandarin’s button in suppressing the Taiping rebellion, who refused a roomful of gold as a bribe, and who, after carefully scratching out the inscription, gave the huge gold medal which he had received from the Emperor of China anonymously to the Coventry Relief Fund. This “give away your medal,” to use his own words, is the keynote of his whole life. Gordon worked “for honour, not honours,” and that one letter makes a great deal of difference. We see here, too, the sign of his kinship with other Empire-Makers, the faculty of seeing what work had to be done and the power of doing it for its own sake, whatever difficulties there might lie in the way.