The British Campaign in the Soudan. 167 to their allies and guardians with frantic appeals for protection. The British Ministry’s reply was that all the country above the First Cataract must be abandoned !

Should the reader incline to believe that I am biased in my judgment of events by anti-British prejudices, I beg leave to state that nothing that I could say approaches the severity with which the course of the British government was denounced from the time of Ismail’s deposition and even before, to the present time, by some of the most talented and prominent men of England, among whom are Prof. Dicey, Sir Samuel Baker, Henry Labouchere, Sir Henry Layard, and a number of others. I am not affected with either anglo-phobia or anglo-mania. Next after being an American (a good long way after, it is true), I would prefer being an Englishman. My judgment on this subject is formed upon British statements, and my narrative of the campaign is taken mainly from British accounts impartially presented and criticised.

I quote from a letter to the “The Times,” dated Cairo, April 5, 1884, from Sir Samuel Baker, the African explorer and Gordon’s predecessor as Governor-General of the Soudan, a man whose position and experience give uncommon value to his utterances upon the Soudan question : .‘‘ We have so completely abstracted every vestige of power and authority from the unfortunate Khedive, that he cannot even nominate his own officers in any branch of the military or civil services. Having divested the legal ruler of the country of all importance, we add insult to injury by utterly disregarding his personal existence in Egypt. . . . The so-called ‘authority’ of the Khedive was rudely, if not brutally, negatived by direct orders from Downing Street to abandon the Soudan against the wishes of the ruler, supported by his Ministry, who resigned en masse at the presumptuous intrusion of the British dzetum.