66 THE WAR IN THE SOUDAN.

CHAPTER XVIII.

“WHAT SHALL WE DO?”

“ England may thank God that the conference is a still-born child, and that the miscarriage has saved us from a multiple paternity with an individual responsibility. The question of a new birth now arises. What shall we do ? ” So wrote Sir Samuel White Baker in the week in which happened the events chronicled in the closing paragraph of the last chapter.

We are now, my reader, approaching one of the most interesting of the stages of English interference in Egyptian affairs. That interference may be divided into five periods : First, from the bombardment of Alexandria to the sending of General Gordon ; second, from the sending of General Gordon to the investment of Khartoum ; third, from the investment of Khartoum to the vote of censure ; fourth, from the vote of censure to the sending of a relief expedition ; the fifth period is that in which we now find ourselves. Where it will end who shall say ? * This tragedy—as I have already called it—bears a likeness more to the drama of the Greeks than to that to which Coleridge has given the name “ romantic ” : the hero truly dies—dies as a hero should die, in the midst of his foes, never for one moment relinquishing his aim, but there the play does not end. There is yet to follow the avengement of his death. How or when this shall take place, till the curtain falls, none can say.

The play is complete in all its parts : the shelling of the Alexandrian forts, followed by the brilliant defeat of the up-start Arabi and the sober attempt to quell oppression and introduce reforms, was a fitting opening for a drama in which the exhibition of determined force was linked with a moral aim. Under-plots in the shape of expeditions against a rebellious prophet and his doughty lieutenant only served to extend and enhance the effect of the main plot. The episode of the Egyptian conference contributed, as we have seen, to the further complication of the sequence of events. That dispelled, we enter upon, of all the phases of the war, the saddest because the most disastrous.

Already, perhaps, we have lingered too long upon a period in which so little was done ; but we who know how fatal was the result of that inaction, *1. July 11, 1883—January 18, 1884; 2. January 18, 1884—March 24, 1884; 3. March 24, 1884 — April 12, 1884; 4. April 12, 1884—August 28, 1884; 5. August 28, 1884-