"lest   we  forget!"	243
Britain had no business there, it resolved on a policy of immediate
evacuation. But, though nine out of ten Englishmen had never
heard of the Sudan, many of the government's most valued
supporters were deeply interested in it. To the humanitarians
of Exeter Hall it was a stronghold of the slave trade, a field for
missionaries and the home of certain poor Christian converts.
In deference to their wishes Gladstone sent to the Sudan one
who, while formerly its Governor General under Khedive Ismail,
had won merit in their eyes by his Christian vigour in repressing
the slave trade. General Gordon was a strange soldier—half-
crusader, half-adventurer—but he was also a genius. His in-
structions were to withdraw the Christians and all remaining
British and Egyptian subjects. But he deliberately interpreted
them in such a fashion as to secure his own martyrdom in the
Sudanese capital and the tardy dispatch of an eleventh-hour
expeditionary force to relieve him and the country to which
he had given his heart. Gladstone's natural reluctance to rescue
this unjust but heroic steward aroused a wave of moral and patri-
otic indignation. After the fall of Khartoum he found himself
regarded almost as a murderer. He had tried to refrain from
action in the Sudan because he wished to avoid extending the
already vast empire of Britain. But the very humanitarians who
applauded his dislike of imperialism could not refrain from
using the national might to suppress wrong-doing and cruelty.
They hated force. But when it came to the point they hated
slavery more. They did the hating and the soldiers they deplored
did the fighting. And the end of it was a still larger empire than
before.
This contradiction lay at the root of Britain's imperial
difficulties. It was not practicable for a democracy which both
indulged strong moral feelings and allowed its wealth to be
used in large-scale operations outside its own borders, to govern
an empire without an imperial policy. The only result was to
provoke confused and angry situations in which the pressure of
popular opinion compelled more violent imperial action than
any originally contemplated. The bounds of empire continued
to expand because its energies, moral and commercial, were
never canalised in any clearly defined channel. Sometimes the
force that made for expansion was God, sometimes Mammon.
But it was nearly always a confused force.
Nothing illustrated this so well as the history of South Africa.