and "this was a government collecting its taxes." The function
of the Egyptian soldiers "was that of honest countrymen sharing in the
villainy of the brigands from the Levant and Asia Minor, who wrung money,
women, and drink from a miserable population."(82) Yet the railing against
Mr. Gladstone for saying that the "rebels" were rightly struggling to be
free could not have been more furious if the Mahdi had been for dethroning
Marcus Aurelius or Saint Louis of France.

The ministers at Cairo, however, naturally could not find in their hearts
to withdraw from territory that had been theirs for over sixty years,(83)
although in the winter of 1882-3 Colonel Stewart, an able British officer,
had reported that the Egyptian government was wholly unfit to rule the
Soudan; it had not money enough, nor fighting men enough, nor
administrative skill enough, and abandonment at least of large portions of
it was the only reasonable course. Such counsels found no favour with the
khedive's advisers and agents, and General Hicks, an Indian officer,
appointed on the staff of the Egyptian army in the spring of 1883, was now
despatched by the government of the khedive from Khartoum, for the
recovery of distant and formidable regions. If his operations had been
limited to the original intention of clearing Sennaar of rebels and
protecting Khartoum, all might have been well. Unluckily some trivial
successes over the Mahdi encouraged the Cairo government to design an
advance into Kordofan, and the reconquest of all the vast wildernesses of
the Soudan. Lord Dufferin, Sir E. Malet, Colonel Stewart, were all of them
clear that to attempt any such task with an empty chest and a worthless
army was madness, and they all argued for the abandonment of Kordofan and
Darfur. The cabinet in London, fixed in their resolve not to accept
responsibility for a Soudan war, and not to enter upon that responsibility
by giving advice for or against the advance of Hicks, stood aloof.(84) In
view of all that followed later, and of their subsequent adoption of the
policy of abandoning the Soudan, British ministers would evidently have
been wiser if they had now forbidden an advance so pregnant with disaster.
Events showed this to have been the capital miscalculation whence all else
of misfortune followed. The sounder the policy of abandonment, the
stronger the reasons for insisting that the Egyptian government should not
undertake operations inconsistent with that po