" As for future good government, it was evident
that "this we could not secure them without an inordinate expenditure of
men and money. The Soudan is a useless possession; ever was so, and ever
will be so. No one who has ever lived in the Soudan, can escape the
reflection, What a useless possession is this land." Therefore--so he winds
up--"I think H.M.'s government are fully justified in recommending the
evacuation, inasmuch as the sacrifices necessary towards securing a good
government would be far too onerous to admit of any such attempt being
made. Indeed, one may say it is impracticable at any cost. _H.M.'s
government will now leave them as God has placed them._"(94)

It was, therefore, and it is, pure sophistry to contend that Gordon's
policy in undertaking his disastrous mission was evacuation but not
abandonment. To say that the Soudanese should be left in the state in
which God had placed them, to fight it out among themselves, if they were
so minded, is as good a definition of abandonment as can be invented, and
this was the whole spirit of the instructions imposed by the government of
the Queen and accepted by Gordon.

Gordon took with him instruments from the khedive into which, along with
definite and specific statements that evacuation was the object of his
mission, two or three loose sentences are slipped about "establishing
organised government in the different provinces of the Soudan,"
maintaining order, and the like. It is true also that the British cabinet
sanctioned the extension of the area of evacuation from Khartoum to the
whole Soudan.(95) Strictly construed, the whole body of instructions,
including firmans and khedive's proclamations, is not technically compact
nor coherent. But this is only another way of saying that Gordon was to
have the widest discretionary powers as to the manner of carrying out the
policy, and the best time and mode of announcing it. The policy itself, as
well understood by Gordon as by everybody else, was untouched, and it was:
to leave the Soudanese in the state in which God had placed them.

The hot controversy on this point is idle and without substance--the idlest
controversies are always the hottest--for (M60) not only was Gordon the
last man in all the world to hold himself bound by official instructions,
but the actual conditions of the case were too little known, too shifting,
too unstable, to permit of hard and fast directions beforehand how to
solve so despera