gh unusual coincidence the details of his existence
during the tranquil and uneventful period have been preserved with
great amplitude and fidelity by several witnesses associated with him
in his beneficent as well as his official work. It would be easy to
fill a small volume with these particulars, which have been already
given to the world, but here it will suffice to furnish a summary
sufficient to bring out the philanthropic side of his character, and
to explain how and why it came to be thought that Gordon was the man
to solve that ever-pressing but ever-put-off problem of diminishing
the pressure of excessive population and poverty in the eastern
districts of London.

General Gordon arrived in England early in 1865, and proceeded to join
his family at Rockstone Place, Southampton, where he was then doubly
welcomed, as his father was in declining health, and died soon
afterwards. Here Gordon passed a quiet six months, refusing all
invitations with extreme modesty, and in every way baffling the
attempts of relations, friends, and admirers to make a lion of him. He
would not permit anyone to say that his suppression of the Taeping
rebellion was a marvellous feat, and he evaded and resented all the
attempts made by those in power to bring him into prominence as a
national hero. Modesty is becoming as an abstract principle of human
conduct, but Gordon carried it to an excess that made it difficult not
so much for his fellow-men to understand him, as for them to hold
ordinary workaday relations with him. This was due mainly to two
causes--a habitual shyness, and his own perception that he could not
restrain his tongue from uttering unpalatable and unconventional
truths. He was so unworldly and self-sacrificing in his own actions
that he could not let himself become even in a passive sense
subservient to the very worldly means by which all men more or less
advance in public and private life. The desire of Ministers and War
Office authorities to bring him forward, to eulogise his Chinese
exploits, and in the end to give him worthy employment, was regarded
by him as that secret favouritism that he abhorred. He retired into
his shell at every effort made to bring him into prominence. He tore
up his diary sooner than that it should be the means of giving him
notoriety. He even refused special employment and promotion, because
it would put him over the heads of his old comrades at the Woolwich
Academy. The inevitable result