On June 11, he proposed the reduction of Lord Wolseley's grant from £30,000 to £12,000. What, he said, had Lord Wolseley done in Egypt? He went to Ismailia and from thence marched his men to Cairo. He took the straight road, and on the road he found a lot of miserable Arabs entrenched; he advanced and the Arabs marched away. That was the whole history of the exploit in Egypt.[14] Lord Dufferin left Egypt in May, 1883, He was pleased with the success of his mission. To use his own words--"the fellah like his own Memnon had not remained {209} irresponsive to the beams of the new dawn." He left Sir Edward Malet as Consul-General, and resumed his normal functions at Constantinople. He departed under a shower of compliments, and he left Egypt apparently prosperous. Arabi was an exile in Ceylon. Sherif Pasha was the Khedive's loyal and obedient Minister. Sir Archibald Alison was in command of the British garrison. The Egyptian army, about six thousand in number, was under the fostering care of Sir Evelyn Wood. Colonel Scott-Moncrieff directed the work of irrigation, and another Briton, Sir Benson Maxwell, superintended the native tribunals. Hitherto the British Government had made no mistakes, and Egypt had reaped only benefit from the intrusion of the foreigner. The false position in which England stood with full authority, ample power, and no legal right, had not yet led to any consequences of a serious and practical kind.[15] Danger, was, however, creeping up to Egypt from the south. A vast, vaguely limited country, extending from Assouan to the Equator, and known as the Soudan, had been claimed as Egyptian territory by Ismail, who had appointed the famous Gordon Governor-General. On Ismail's fall in '79, Gordon was recalled and the Soudan fell a prey to local bandits. The reconstituted Egyptian Government was incapable of interference, and towards the end of '82 a Mussulman, Mohamed Ahmed, raised the standard of religious reform and rebellion against the distant and incapable Egyptian authorities. The Mahdi, or Messiah, as he called himself, took El Obeid and made himself master of Kordofan by the end of January, '83. In the summer of the same year seven thousand Egyptian troops, under the command of Hicks Pasha, a retired officer of the Indian army, who had entered the service of the Khedive, were dispatched against him by the Egyptian Government. Granville was careful to formally disengage the responsibility of the English Cabinet in this measure. It is certain, however, that he {210} could have prevented this action of the Khedive's Ministers, and, as he was perfectly well aware through the information of Colonel Stewart, who had been associated with Gordon's administration, of the utter impossibility of Hicks's task, it is difficult to acquit him of moral responsibility. "The faith in the power of phrases to alter facts," says Lord Milner in his _England in Egypt_, "has never been more strangely manifested than in