came into
existence--a community consisting of a military class armed with
guns and of multitudes of slaves, at once their servants and their
merchandise, and sometimes trained as soldiers. The dominion might
prosper viciously till it was overthrown by some more powerful league.

All this was unheeded by the outer world, from which the Soudan is
separated by the deserts, and it seemed that the slow, painful course
of development would be unaided and uninterrupted. But at last the
populations of Europe changed. Another civilisation reared itself above
the ruins of Roman triumph and Mohammedan aspiration--a civilisation
more powerful, more glorious, but no less aggressive. The impulse of
conquest which hurried the French and English to Canada and the Indies,
which sent the Dutch to the Cape and the Spaniards to Peru, spread to
Africa and led the Egyptians to the Soudan. In the year 1819 Mohammed
Ali, availing himself of the disorders alike as an excuse and an
opportunity, sent his son Ismail up the Nile with a great army. The Arab
tribes, torn by dissension, exhausted by thirty years of general war,
and no longer inspired by their neglected religion, offered a weak
resistance. Their slaves, having known the worst of life, were
apathetic. The black aboriginals were silent and afraid. The whole vast
territory was conquered with very little fighting, and the victorious
army, leaving garrisons, returned in triumph to the Delta.

What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble
and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile
regions and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to
administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the
slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds
of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities
for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain--what more beautiful
ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort? The act is
virtuous, the exercise invigorating, and the result often extremely
profitable. Yet as the mind turns from the wonderful cloudland of
aspiration to the ugly scaffolding of attempt and achievement, a
succession of opposite ideas arises. Industrious races are displayed
stinted and starved for the sake of an expensive Imperialism which they
can only enjoy if they are well fed. Wild peoples, ignorant of their
barbarism, callous of suffering, careless of lif