the consistency of Gordon's character and redounds to his credit.
It is satisfactory also to know that the officials of the Indian
Foreign Office afterwards termed the documents sent from
Cabul "worthless trash." This was the reason for General
Gordon's sudden retirement from an uncongenial post, as he
explained it himself, and on his return to England he made
more than one attempt to procure what he considered justice
for Yakoob Khan.
From India he went to China in response to a summons
from his former colleague Li-Hung-Chang, and he is credited
with having inspired the Chinese with peaceful views at the
most critical period of one of their disputes with Russia. Per-
haps his presence in China may not have been without some
effect also at St. Petersburg. However, he gave the Chinese
excellent advice as to the kind of war they should wage, and
it is possible to detect in their recent fighting with the French
some trace of their having profited by his recommendations.
From China he came back to England, but his stay was
short. A distinguished brother officer had, in the usual course
of duty, to proceed to the Mauritius to command the engineers
in that possession. The work was uninviting and distasteful,
and he mentioned the fact to Colonel Gordon. The latter, in
his too generous fashion, at once replied, " Oh, I will go in
your place." For more than a year he remained in this island,
although the task proved exceedingly irksome, but on his
attaining the rank of Major-General he was relieved from his
post. Then the Cape authorities, with trouble on their hands
in Basutoland, applied to him, and he went at once in response
to their appeal. The true story has yet to be told of how he
visited Masupha, and of the manner in which the colonial
authorities played him false, and brought his life into jeopardy,
had Masupha shown himself a less generous foe. It is one of
the few blanks that remain to be filled up in the varied and
remarkable career which has now closed.
His South African experiences seem to have intensified his
reserve, and to have strengthened his resolve to live apart from
GENERAL GORDON 189
his fellow-men. After a very brief visit to this country he
left for Palestine, where he resided principally at Jaffa during
the whole of 1883. There he passed his time in meditation
on the meaning of the Book of Revelation, and also in con-
sidering the condition of the Turkish Empire. His interest
in the Egyptian question was very keen, and he followed each
move on the political chess-board at Cairo with great attention
and intimate local knowledge. He suddenly returned to Europe
in the last month of 1883, and it was not long before it became
known that he had accepted a command from the King of the
Belgians to proceed to the Congo. How that plan was changed
at the last moment and how he proceeded at the shortest
notice to Egypt has been too recently narrated in our columns
to need repetition. Nor need anything more be said of that
marvellous defence of Khartoum for nearly twelve months,
which is in every way worthy of the man who was not only
successful in almost everything he undertook, but who made
the simplest tasks appear honourable by the noble manner in
which he carried them out. There is no other name in history
with which so many striking achievements will be permanently
associated. The last is the most brilliant of them all ; and
there is some solace in the thought that, while elsewhere he
fought for the benefit of foreign countries, he upheld at Khar-
toum the honour of his own country when it had been allowed
by our statesmen to sink very low. For that alone he would
command the gratitude of all true Englishmen.
In conclusion, some reflections appropriately suggest them-
selves about one who filled so prominent a place in the eyes
of his countrymen, by whom he will ever be remembered with
pride mingled with regret. One of the. salient features in
Gordon's character, without a due allowance for which it is
impossible to measure the exact value of his opinions, was his
extraordinary placability. No one was gifted in a higher
degree than he was with that marvellous insight into human
character which amounts almost to an instinct, and in which
women are, perhaps too credulously, believed to excel. He
seldom failed to detect the impostor, the self-seeker, and the
tyrant, whether he was only a minister or majesty himself ;
and with some definite object of good in his mind he would
express his opinions without qualification, and with a candour
that spared not susceptibilities and that injured reputations.
190 EMINENT PERSONS
And then, after a little time, when the object had been attained
or had passed out of his mind, he would be disposed to relent
towards the individual and to say, "Who am I that I should
judge?"
No one read Nubar with a truer glance than he on their first
coming in contact ten years ago, but he more recently repented
of the severity of his denunciation. It is not difficult, therefore,
to find much that may at first sight appear inconsistent in
Gordon's instinctive aversion, and his subsequent interviews and
friendly intercourse with Nubar at Cairo. It is only removed
by the certain conviction all who knew him well will have that
Gordon never wavered or faltered in his own opinions. His
humility led him to go out of his way to show that he considered
that he had no right to judge harshly of any one. So it was also
with Zebehr. He knew that we might as well expect the
leopard to change its spots as to ask the king of the slaveholders
to injure the institution which gave him political power and
wealth. And when General Gordon expressed his desire for the
return to the Soudan of the man whom he alone had kept at
Cairo during all these years, there was further evidence of his
relenting towards an adversary. He also charitably said that
Zebehr had probably improved during his exile. At the same
time, he justified Zebehr's appointment by the necessities of
English policy in the Soudan if the evacuation was to be
carried out.
Another circumstance must be taken into account in deciding
what Gordon's own views were on the subject of what he could
perform and as to what policy was feasible. The man who has
accomplished the marvellous, especially when the imperfection
of his means leaves little or nothing to be detracted from the
personal influence of his character, acquires a degree of self-con-
fidence which in ordinary men becomes vanity or arrogance ;
but in Gordon, whose mind was tinged with a strong religious
feeling of the Puritan type from the earliest period, it became
an intensified and increasing belief that he was a selected
emissary and chosen agent of God. Something of this was
perceptible so long ago as his China campaigns, when it may
be said without exaggeration that he really represented the good
and the advantage of the people as something apart and distinct
from the political objects kept in view by the Chinese Govern-
ment and the Taeping rebels. It became stronger during his
GENERAL GORDON 191
residence at Gravesend, when he attached to his person boys of
the poorer classes strictly speaking, of no class at all ; but it
was the long solitary life in the Soudan that most strengthened
the feeling, until it became so closely ingrained in his nature
that it formed part of the man. The solitude of his life when
he had no other companion than his Bible, as well as the
character of his work, when he had to perform, as he has himself
told us, all the functions of all the Ministers, naturally increased
the conviction that the whole burden of the Government rested
on his shoulders, and that without his personal energy every-
thing would go wrong.
General Gordon realised all this with as little sense of
personal vanity as it is possible for weak human nature to feel ;
but, while this was so, there was an accentuated assurance that
he was the agent of good by Divine permission if not appoint-
ment. He never sought but rather shunned employment. Yet
when any specific work was offered or forced upon him he never
refused or showed lukewarmness, accepting the summons as the
decree of Providence with as much calmness as a Mahomedan
would accept kismet. Sometimes when an avenue of doing
some real good seemed open to him he would be filled with
almost youthful enthusiasm ; but such cannot be said to have
been the case with regard to his last journey to Khartoum, for
he was going to announce to a people the promise of whose
emancipation he had procured some years ago that the English
people and Government had not the will and the power to
redeem the pledge of their nominee the Khedive.
When people ask why General Gordon went on this mission
they forget that General Gordon was an officer of the Queen and
on the Active List, and that his devotion to duty was always so
strong that all his arrangements with foreign governments were
accompanied by the proviso "unless my own Government
requires my services." But still if General Gordon went back
to the Soudan with the absence of that enthusiasm which in the
case of men of his temperament is the best guarantee of success,
it cannot be said that he was hopeless of doing any good. He
was not able to assure the peoples of the Soudan that he had
received the fiat of England to spare neither its treasure nor its
authority in giving effect to the Convention of 1877; but still
he might be able to bear the olive branch of peace if he could
only allay the popular excitement by assuring the people that
192 EMINENT PERSONS
nothing would be disturbed, that the slaves should remain slaves,
and that their owners should be left unmolested in all their
rights of property. The policy is not a worthy or, as events
will prove, a profitable one ; but let the responsibility rest on
those who ordered it, not on the agent who from the most laud-
able motives sought to carry it out, even after he had clearly
described what he considered to be the true policy.
But there can be little doubt that General Gordon in
accepting the mission to Khartoum was actuated by only two
considerations first, a sense of duty ; and, secondly, a belief
that if he could not do the greatest possible good he might still
do much that would benefit the people and promote the chances
of peace. His mode of reasoning was simple. It ran thus :
" If God wills it, nothing is impossible. He has placed this
work before me, and it is my part only to obey. At the
worst I die or am killed, which is nothing, and nobody else is
involved."
With regard to his Congo mission, which it is appropriate to
consider here from the sudden manner in which it was postponed
and gave place to the journey to Khartoum, it is no longer
indelicate to say that he regarded it with a double feeling. On
the one hand he felt bound by his pledge to the King of the
Belgians, and the fulfilment of his promise was rendered all the
more pleasing to him by the frank and generous manner in
which the King met every wish and accepted all the responsi-
bilities of General Gordon's transfer from the English Army to
his own, including the settlement of a sum of <7000 upon his
heirs. He imagined and drew up for his own personal conviction
a scheme for the suppression of the slave trade by means of
armed levies raised on the Congo for the conquest or subjugation
of the great slave-capturing people, the Niam Niam. The details
of that scheme, as given by himself, were recorded in an article
which appeared in the Times of the 17th of January last year,
and although they were not destined to be realised they are
interesting as a project of imaginative philanthropy. In the
commercial prospects of the Congo route he took little or no
interest. He revealed his own opinion when he said in a
striking sentence, " Those equatorial regions of Africa are all the
same, they have only steam." Still his heart was never
thoroughly in this work, and on the morning of his last
departure for Brussels he repeatedly expressed the hope that
GENERAL GORDON 193
" there may be a respite, but in any case if I live I go to the
Congo for the King in October." Whether this was merely a
presentiment, or whether on that morning of the 16th of
January he really knew that his destination had been changed
but was under a promise of secrecy, we have no means of saying,
but certainly his own relatives did not know until a later date
that Egypt had been substituted for the Congo. The respite
was granted, but there will be few of his friends who will not
regret it. It would have been better to have attempted single-
handed a chivalrous, if probably vain, crusade against the Niam
Niam in the heart of Africa than to have been reserved for the
fate of being the personal exponent of the weakness and pro-
crastination of his own country.
LEADING ARTICLE, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1885
The country is as yet in possession of no further authentic
details respecting the reported death of General Gordon. Up
to last night the War Office had received from Lord Wolseley
no confirmation of the story which was brought on the preceding
day to Korti from Gubat, and which so profoundly stirred the
whole country yesterday. This absence of news is not, indeed,
difficult to account for. As we announced yesterday, the head-
quarters started on the previous day to cross the desert ; and
consequently Lord Wolseley being removed from the end of his
telegraph wire, messages from him would of course be longer in
coming. Again, he would be especially careful not to send a
positive confirmation of such important news until all doubt was
finally cleared from his own mind. So far as it appears as yet,
all that was yesterday telegraphed to England, whether by
Router's Agency or through other channels, may have come from
one source, the messenger or messengers who professed to bring
news to Colonel Boscawen. If so, there is of course the possi-
bility that the news may be an invention, or at least a perversion
of the facts. This, however, is the very most that can be said,
and it must be owned that it does not tell strongly on the side
of hope. The story as we have it is so precise, so circumstantial,
and fits in so exactly with what Sir Charles Wilson saw and
inferred, that the chances in favour of its truth seem to be
overwhelming. We are then, unhappily, justified in treating it
as true, and in regarding that brilliant, that unique career, as
VOL. in o
194 EMINENT PERSONS
closed. On another page we tell the story of it in detail. Here
we may be content to touch rapidly upon some of the main
points in a life and character which stand alone in modern times,
or, if not alone, which place the name of Gordon side by side
with that of Garibaldi.
All that has recently been told of Gordon's youth proves
that he made his mark, and showed of what stuff he was made,
very early in his career not, indeed, at Woolwich, but in the
trenches before Sebastopol, whither he went at the age of one-
and-twenty. The peculiar religious beliefs which coloured his
whole later life had not then taken possession of him ; but the
character was essentially the same then as always. The story
which we tell this morning of his leaping on the bastion in the
face of the Russian sharpshooters, by way of shaming a corporal
into doing his duty, is thoroughly characteristic ; it is of a
piece with his leading the storming parties in China armed but
with a cane. Devotion of this rare kind was even then accom-
panied with the highest military aptitudes and with the strictest
performance of his purely professional duties ; his services as an
engineer officer were conspicuous, and were highly valued by
his official superiors, when, after the war was over, the young
subaltern served on the Delimitation Commissions both in
Bessarabia and Armenia.
The next four years he seems to have spent at Chatham in
the routine of his profession ; but in 1860 he took the step
which, as it eventually happened, was to be the decisive step of
his life. He went to China to join the British force which
was co-operating with the French in endeavouring to compel
respect for the Elgin Treaty ; he was present in the march on
Pekin, and in the attack on the Summer Palace ; he was
stationed at Tientsin for the two following years ; and he found
himself at Shanghai during the critical time of the Taeping
rebellion. In March 1863, at thirty years of age, and holding
only the brevet rank of Major in the English Army, he took the
command of the 3000 Chinese Imperialists to whom was com-
mitted the forlorn hope of defeating and crushing the hordes of
ferocious insurgents who had for a long time past been desolat-
ing the richest province of the Chinese Empire and shaking the
established authority to its foundations. How he performed
his task, with what extraordinary combination of discipline
and dash, courage and sympathy, enthusiasm and resource, he
GENERAL GORDON 195
succeeded in making his ragged regiment into an army, and in
taking fort after fort and city after cityj is told at length in our
columns this morning. In fourteen months, with but a hand-
ful of fighting men, and hampered by the corruptest officials in
the world, he succeeded in completely suppressing a rebellion
which, as is only fully realised by those who were in China at
the time, has never been equalled in point of sheer wanton
destructiveness since the days of Tamerlane.
Gordon's task, as he conceived it, was simple. He knew
that the officials of Pekin were corrupt, but he saw that the
rebels would put nothing better in their place ; and he believed
in Li-Hung-Chang. He carried out his achievement with that
same unique combination of inventiveness and energy, self-
devotion and sympathetic understanding of his materials, that
the world has since then learned to identify with his name.
The Chinese Empire was saved from anarchy ; and Gordon,
henceforth " Chinese Gordon," refusing all reward, went back
to his ordinary work as a simple officer of the British Army.
He had achieved the first great work of his life, but much
else remained. At Gravesend, where he was employed in
improving the defences of the Thames, he set himself, according
to the now familiar story, to reclaim scores of the young waifs
and strays of London, and succeeded in making many a little
outcast into an excellent servant of his country. Then he
became Consul at Galatz, and was lost to view for three years,
to emerge suddenly, at the end of 1873, as the successor of Sir
Samuel Baker in the government of the Egyptian Soudan.
Here, in two periods of less than two years each, and mainly
by peaceful means, he achieved the second great work of his
life a work which only causes independent of himself have
made to be less permanent than his achievement in China. He
surveyed the White Nile up to Gondokoro ; he prepared the
way for the abolition of the slave trade ; he began the disband-
ing of the Bashi-Bazouks who encouraged it, and tempted the
people to revolt against their cruelties and exactions ; he con-
ciliated and pacified the people ; and he spread the belief in
his own name almost as successfully as he had spread it in
China. Once he had resigned and returned to England ; but
Ismail begged him to go back, and he consented. Then, on
the accession of Tewfik, he resigned once more, on the ground
that he had done as much as any one man could do.
196 EMINENT PERSONS
There is an unpublished story of a conversation which he
had at that time with an English official in Cairo, which throws
a good deal of light both on his character and on the problem
of government in those barbarous regions. " I shall go," he
said, " and you must get a man to succeed me if you can.
But I do not deny that he will want three qualifications which
are seldom found together. First, he must have my iron con-
stitution ; for Khartoum is too much for any one who has not.
Then, he must have my contempt for money ; otherwise the
people will never believe in his sincerity. Lastly, he must
have my contempt for death." Such a man was not found ;
and the Eastern Soudan relapsed into the state of administra-
tive chaos of which the Mahdi, the representative alike of the
vested interests of the slaveholders and of Mussulman fanati-
cism, is the outcome.
There is no need to tell more of the heroic but painful story
how Gordon, called away from the equally superhuman task
of coping with slavery on the Upper Congo, was sent a year
ago to try to resettle the Soudan, to bring away the Egyptian
garrisons, and to divide the region, if possible, among petty
sultans who would be strong enough to keep order. He went,
as all the world knows, unaided. He had but one English
companion, the lamented Colonel Stewart ; his self-devotion
asked no more. Still, it became very soon apparent that if his
mission was to succeed he must be supported from England ;
and we, unlike some of those who are now ostentatiously
lamenting him, lost no opportunity of urging the Government
to send support. The Government was silent, and for many
months General Gordon had to employ against the besieging
forces that endless resource, that unbounded ingenuity, in which
he stood alone, and which made the story told by our late
correspondent, Mr. Power, a document almost without a parallel
among military annals.
The marvellous career, it is to be feared, is now ended.
The life is over ; at the moment when relief was at hand,
treachery did that which force could not do, and Gordon, if we
are to believe the too probable story, fell with the fall of
Khartoum. All is over except his influence, his example, his
name. Probably the grief and admiration of his country will
find expression in some great material monument ; and the
richest and the noblest that the sculptor's art could produce
GENERAL GORDON 197
would be well deserved. But " the labour of an age in piled
stones " is not necessary to keep alive the memory of one
whose life was its own best monument. That life has done
much for this generation. It has served conspicuously to
remind us that the age of chivalry is not dead ; that chivalry
in the highest sense is rare indeed, but that its influence is as
great and as far-reaching as of old. It has proved, too, that
the English race is in no sense degenerate if that needed to be
proved to a people which, among much that is sad and sordid,
yet sees all round it the daily acts of heroism that its best men
and women are performing. Gordon's life and death bear
bright and noble witness that even in a materialistic age the
ideals of faith, duty, and enthusiasm are living forces still.
EARL CAIRNS
OBITUARY NOTICE, FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 1885
THE death of Lord Cairns is a great, we had almost said an
irremediable, loss to the Conservative party in the Upper House.
His great legal acquirements and acumen, and his sagacious
counsels, made him an invaluable leader of his party on all
occasions, but more especially in periods of difficulty and of
crisis. If Lord Salisbury may be called the Achilles of the
Conservative party, the deceased Earl notwithstanding that he
was not ripe in years as men count statesmanship was well
entitled to the epithet of the Nestor of that party. The full
extent of the loss the Conservatives are called upon to sustain
by his death will not be realised until the leaders of the party
are once more summoned to undertake the responsibilities of
office. The influence of Lord Cairns upon Conservatism was
pre-eminently a salutary one useful in moderating the zeal of
the most active members of the party, and invaluable as a con-
structive force in practical legislation.
The Right Hon. Hugh MacCalmont, Earl Cairns, was the
son of Mr. William Cairns, of Cultra, County Down, by
Rosanna, daughter of Mr. H. Johnson. The Cairns family
originally went over to Ireland from the South of Scotland.
Thomas Cairns, of the Cairns, Orchardtown, in the Stewartry of
Kirkcudbright, migrated with Murray, Earl of Annandale, who
was his uncle by marriage. He settled in Ulster in the reign
of James I. A grandson of his, Alexander Cairns, was with
Marlborough at the battle of Blenheim, and in 1708 was created
a baronet for his services. The baronetcy afterwards became
extinct. Another member of the family represented the borough
EARL CAIRNS 199
of Belfast in the Irish Parliament from 1703 to 1707. The
father of the deceased Earl ultimately became the representative
of the family in the male line, Lord Cairns being his second son.
His lordship was born in the year 1819, so that he had only