otes, "it seemed as if by my casting vote
Zobier was to be sent to Gordon. But on Sunday ---- and ---- receded from
their ground, and I gave way. The nature of the evidence on which
judgments are formed in this most strange of all cases, precludes (in
reason) pressing all conclusions, which are but preferences, to extremes."
"It is well known," said Mr. Gladstone in the following year when the
curtain had fallen on the catastrophe, "that if, when the recommendation
to send Zobeir was made, we had complied with it, an address from this
House to the crown would have paralysed our action; and though it was
perfectly true that the decision arrived at was the judgment of the
cabinet, it was also no less the judgment of parliament and the people."
So Gordon's request was refused.

It is true that, as a minister put it at the time, to send Zobeir would
have been a gambler's throw. But then what was it but a gambler's throw to
send Gordon himself? The Soudanese chieftain might possibly have done all
that Gordon and Stewart, who knew the ground and were watching the quick
fluctuation of events with elastic minds, now positively declared that he
would have the strongest motives not to do. Even then, could the issue
have been worse? To run all the risks involved in the despatch of Gordon,
and then immediately to refuse the request that he persistently
represented as furnishing him his only chance, was an incoherence that the
parliament and people of England have not often surpassed.(101) All
through this critical month, from the 10th until the 30th, Mr. Gladstone
was suffering more or less from indisposition which he found it difficult
to throw off.

VI

The chance, whatever it may have been, passed like a flash. Just as the
proposal inflamed many in England, so it did mischief in Cairo. Zobeir
like other people got wind of it; enemies of England at Cairo set to work
with him; Sir E. Baring might have found him hard to deal with. It was
Gordon's rashness that had made the design public. Gordon, too, as it
happened, had made a dire mistake on his way up. At Berber he had shown
the khedive's secret firman, (M63) announcing the intended abandonment of
the Soudan. The news spread; it soon reached the Mahdi himself, and the
Mahdi made politic use of it. He issued a proclamation of his own, asking
all the sheikhs who stood aloof from him or against him, what they had to
gain by supporting a pasha who was the next day going to gi