ed the
King of the Belgians will consent to his postponing the fulfilment of
his promise, as Gordon knows he cannot help but do, for it was given
on the express stipulation that the claim of his own country should
always come first. King Leopold, who has behaved throughout with
generosity, and the most kind consideration towards Gordon, is
naturally displeased and upset, but he feels that he cannot restrain
Gordon or insist on the letter of his bond. The Congo Mission is
therefore broken off or suspended, as described in the last chapter.
In the evening of the 15th Lord Granville despatched a telegram to Sir
Evelyn Baring, no longer asking his opinion or advice, but stating
that the Government have determined to send General Gordon to the
Soudan, and that he will start without delay. To that telegram the
British representative could make no demur short of resigning his
post, but at last the grudging admission was wrung from him that
"Gordon would be the best man." This conclusion, to which anyone
conversant with the facts, as Sir Evelyn Baring was, would have come
at once, was therefore only arrived at seven weeks after Sir Charles
Dilke first brought forward Gordon's name as the right person to deal
with the Soudan difficulty. That loss of time was irreparable, and in
the end proved fatal to Gordon himself.

In describing the last mission, betrayal, and death of Gordon, the
heavy responsibility of assigning the just blame to those individuals
who were in a special degree the cause of that hero's fate cannot be
shirked by any writer pretending to record history. Lord Cromer has
filled a difficult post in Egypt for many years with advantage to his
country, but in the matter of General Gordon's last Nile mission he
allowed his personal feelings to obscure his judgment. He knew that
Gordon was a difficult, let it be granted an impossible, colleague;
that he would do things in his own way in defiance of diplomatic
timidity and official rigidity; and that, instead of there being in
the Egyptian firmament the one planet Baring, there would be only the
single sun of Gordon. All these considerations were human, but they
none the less show that he allowed his private feelings, his
resentment at Gordon's treatment of him in 1878, to bias his judgment
in a matter of public moment. It was his opposition alone that
retarded Gordon's departure by seven weeks, and indeed the delay was
longer, as Gordon was then at Jaffa, and that del