It had been the intention of the Government to reduce the number of the troops in Egypt, and some hint of this had been given by Mr. Gladstone at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in the Guildhall. But before the plan could be carried out a catastrophe happened in Egypt which interfered with it. It had always been the ambition of the Khedivial family to extend their dominion to the Equator. They had drained Egypt of men and money to conquer that vast and difficult region known as the Soudan, and under the pretext of suppressing the slave trade, they had endeavoured to sanctify their policy of costly conquest. When, however, disturbances broke out in Lower Egypt, the wild tribes of the Soudan, ever ready to revolt against the Egyptians or “Turks,” whom they regarded as brutal extortioners, joined the standards of a pretended prophet, called the Mahdi, and Colonel Hicks, a retired Indian officer, was sent with an Egyptian army to suppress the rising. The British Government sanctioned, but gave no aid to the expedition. By their foolish policy they made themselves morally responsible for its fate without taking steps to make its success a certainty. In November Hicks Pasha and his army were cut to pieces at El Obeid, and Egyptian authority in the Soudan was represented by a few beleaguered garrisons at such places as Khartoum, Suakim, and Sinkat. The British Government dissuaded Tewfik Pasha from trying to re-conquer the Soudan, but advised him merely to relieve the garrisons and hold the Red Sea coast and the Nile Valley as far as Wady Halfa. By thus blocking the only outlets for its produce the insurrection in the province might be strangled. Here the Ministry delivered themselves into the hands of their enemies. If they tried to re-conquer the Soudan the Tories could denounce a blood-guilty policy that wasted the substance of Egypt to gratify Khedivial ambition. If they induced Tewfik Pasha to let the Soudan alone, they could be denounced for abandoning one of the conquests of civilisation to barbarism and the slave trade. But in the first weeks of 1884 there was a lull in political agitation, which was only partially broken by Mr. Gladstone’s address to his tenants at the Hawarden Rent Dinner on the 9th of January. It was in this speech that he advised farmers groaning under prolonged agricultural distress, aggravated by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, to seek consolation in pensive reflection on the Hares and Rabbits Act, and in an energetic application of their industry to the production of jam. CHAPTER XXVII. GENERAL GORDON’S MISSION.