SECOND STAGE OF INTERVENTION. 165 disastrous defeat at the hands of the Abyssinians, by whom Prince Hassan had been taken prisoner. General Gordon, who had succeeded Sir Samuel Baker as Governor-General of the Soudan, had been instructed, with the view of conciliating public opinion in Europe, to discourage the slave trade, and had taken his instructions, to use a French phrase, •*at the foot of the letter." Acting upon what he believed to be instructions given in good faith, Gordon had embarked on a crusade for the extermination of the Dervish slave-traders, an enterprise which Ismail had never contemplated, and indeed regarded as fatal to his scheme for the extension of his dominions to the Equatorial lakes. At home, the fate of the Mufettish, whether deserved or ill-deserved, had shaken • the confidence of his native adherents in their Lord and Master's power to support them if they incurred the disapproval of the foreign officials for acts committed in his service and presumably by his instructions. Then, too, Ismail was constantly harassed by intimations from Constantinople that the state of afifairs in Egypt was viewed with grave anxiety by the Porte, and that this anxiety might be attended with unpleasant consequences if some means were not employed for its removal. But, above all, he was kept on tenter-hooks by the knowledge that an agitation was gaining ground in Europe for the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry to conduct an independent investigation into the causes of Egypt's indebtedness, and into the discrepancies between the estimates of the revenue —