the end proved fatal to Gordon himself. In describing the last mission, betrayal, and death of Gordon, the heavy responsibility of assigning the just blame to those individuals who were in a special degree the cause of that hero's fate cannot be shirked by any writer pretending to record history. Lord Cromer has filled a difficult post in Egypt for many years with advantage to his country, but in the matter of General Gordon's last Nile mission he allowed his personal feelings to obscure his judgment. He knew that Gordon was a difficult, let it be granted an impossible, colleague; that he would do things in his own way in defiance of diplomatic timidity and official rigidity; and that, instead of there being in the Egyptian firmament the one planet Baring, there would be only the single sun of Gordon. All these considerations were human, but they none the less show that he allowed his private feelings, his resentment at Gordon's treatment of him in 1878, to bias his judgment in a matter of public moment. It was his opposition alone that retarded Gordon's departure by seven weeks, and indeed the delay was longer, as Gordon was then at Jaffa, and that delay, I repeat it solemnly, cost Gordon his life. Whoever else was to blame afterwards, the first against whom a verdict of Guilty must be entered, without any hope of reprieve at the bar of history, was Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer. Mr Gladstone and his Government are certainly clear of any reflection in this stage of the matter. They did their best to put forward General Gordon immediately on the news coming of the Hicks disaster, and although they might have shown greater determination in compelling the adoption of their plan, which they were eventually obliged to do, this was a very venial fault, and not in any serious way blameworthy. Nor did they ever seek to repudiate their responsibility for sending Gordon to the Soudan, although a somewhat craven statement by Lord Granville, in a speech at Shrewsbury in September 1885, to the effect that "Gordon went to Khartoum at his own request," might seem to infer that they did. This remark may have been a slip, or an incorrect mode of saying that Gordon willingly accepted the task given him by the Government, but Mr Gladstone placed the matter in its true light when he wrote that "General Gordon went to the Soudan at the request of H.M.'s Government."