This time he went to Abyssinia also, and got arrested twice, a circumstance which enabled him to give us the following word picture of King Johannes. “He is of the strictest sect of the Pharisees. He talks like the Old Testament. Drunk overnight, he is up at dawn reading the psalms. If he were in England he would never miss a prayer-meeting, and would have a Bible as big as a portmanteau.” After his release he came home again to rest, as he thought, but as a fact to be called after a few weeks’ run on the Continent to take the command of the Colonial Forces at the Cape of Good Hope. It was the eve of the Transvaal War, and now Gordon made the first and the greatest mistake of his life. He refused the command. If he had taken it there might have been no Transvaal War; certainly there would have been no Ingogo or Majuba Hill. He started instead to India to be Secretary to Lord Ripon, the new Liberal Viceroy. Three days after he landed he threw up his appointment, and two days later he received an urgent invitation from China. He asked for leave, and the War Office refused. He threw up his commission, making a present of its value, about £6,000, to his stupid and graceless masters. He stopped the war with Russia, and sped back again to London, receiving a telegram on the way telling him that his leave had been cancelled and his resignation refused. He afterwards made a futile visit to Ireland and an equally futile trip to South Africa. He offered to go and help in settling the Basuto trouble. The Cape Government, to its loss and its shame, had not even the politeness to reply to his offer, but when two millions of money and a great number of valuable lives had been lost, they asked him a year later if he would renew his offer, and, like the generous and single-hearted hero that he was, he did so. Unhappily, however, when he got on the scene of action he spoilt everything by allowing the enthusiast in him to get the better of the soldier and the skilled man of affairs. The Cape Government was certainly in the wrong as regards the Basuto question. Gordon’s advice to them was to admit their wrong and begin to do right. Very good indeed from the ethical point of view, but in practice hopelessly wrong and bad where the South African native is concerned. With him, as with the Boers, to admit yourself in the wrong is to own yourself defeated, and to invite instant aggression. Of course the Cape Government could do nothing of the sort. To have done so would have been to have kindled the flames of native war over the whole southern half of the Continent. This was the fatal policy which had already lost us the Transvaal when Sir Evelyn Wood had it in the hollow of his hand. To have repeated it would probably have been to lose all South Africa. Gordon, in his usual fashion, threw up his appointment at once and came back to England.