"We are going to send down the _Bordeen_ the day after to-morrow, and with her I shall send this Journal. _If some effort is not made before ten days' time the town will fall._ It is inexplicable this delay. If the Expeditionary forces have reached the river and met my steamers, one hundred men are all that we require just to show themselves.... Even if the town falls under the nose of the Expeditionary forces it will not in my opinion justify the abandonment of Senaar and Kassala, or of the Equatorial Province by H.M.'s Government. All that is absolutely necessary is for fifty of the Expeditionary force to get on board a steamer and come up to Halfiyeh, and thus let their presence be felt. This is not asking much, but it must happen _at once_, or it will (as usual) be too late." The motives which induced Mr Gladstone's Government to send General Gordon to the Soudan in January 1884 were, as has been clearly shown, the selfish desire to appease public opinion, and to shirk in the easiest possible manner a great responsibility. They had no policy at all, but they had one supreme wish, viz. to cut off the Soudan from Egypt; and if the Mahdi had only known their wishes and pressed on, and treated the Khartoum force as he had treated that under Hicks, there would have been no garrisons to rescue, and that British Government would have done nothing. It recked nothing of the grave dangers that would have accrued from the complete triumph of the Mahdi, or of the outbreak that must have followed in Lower Egypt if his tide of success had not been checked as it was single-handed by General Gordon, through the twelve months' defence of Khartoum. Still it could not quite stoop to the dishonour of abandoning these garrisons, and of making itself an accomplice to the Mahdi's butcheries, nor could it altogether turn a deaf ear to the representations and remonstrances of even such a puppet prince as the Khedive Tewfik. England was then far more mistress of the situation at Cairo than she is now, but a helpless refusal to discharge her duty might have provoked Europe into action at the Porte that would have proved inconvenient and damaging to her position and reputation. Therefore the Government fell back on General Gordon, and the hope was even indulged that, under his exceptional reputation, the evacuation of the Soudan might not only be successfully carried out, but that his success might induce the public and the world to accept that abnegation of policy as the acme of wisdom. In all this they were destined to a complete awakening, and the only matter of surprise is that they should have sent so well-known a character as General Gordon, whose independence and contempt for official etiquette and restraint were no secrets at the Foreign and War Offices, on a mission in which they required him not only to be as indifferent to the