Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

History will probably say with truth that every member of that fatally futile Cabinet who had any hand in sending Gordon to Khartoum and neglecting to give him reasonable support incurred a direct and personal responsibility for his death, from which the dispassionate verdict of Posterity will be very slow to relieve their memories.

It is a stain that can never pass away from their public reputations. There are other faults of a similar sort for which these men will be arraigned at the bar of History, but the fate of the lonely, betrayed man, who day after day left his starving and ever-diminishing garrison to look out across the desert from the battlements of Khartoum for the help which, for him, never came, will certainly be considered the blackest if not the greatest of them all.

But there is another and very practical sense in which Gordon was a British Empire-Maker. This realm of ours is what it is, not only because we have fought for some parts of it and successfully stolen others. It is ours because we knew how to make use of it after we got it; because of all other men now existing on the face of the earth the Anglo-Saxon is the best leader and governor of savage and semi-savage men that has so far been evolved, and of such leaders and governors Gordon plainly proved himself to be one of the very best.

Under the British flag he never won a battle for Britain. The genius which his Motherland might have made such splendid use of did its best work under the dragon-flag of China and the crescent-flag of Egypt, but nevertheless on the day when the last mile of the British high road from Cairo to Cape Town is thrown open, and the Pax Britannica is proclaimed from north to south of Africa, men will remember Gordon and confess that without him this might never have been done.

It will have been noticed by those who have read between the lines here printed that where Empire-Makers are concerned the old-fashioned idea of ancestry seems to be not altogether the fiction that certain latter-day theorists, men of words to a man, have sought to make it, and Gordon was no exception to this rule.

His lineage stretches away back into the dim mists which lie behind the history of all these islands into the days when Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen had yet to be thought of, and when the divisions of mankind were racial rather than national.

Of course the Gordons of last century were for the most part desperate Jacobites, and as such were hinderers rather than doers of the work of empire-making. But, curiously enough, this particular Gordon did not come from these. On the contrary, there was a fight during that miserable business of 1745 in which, on the field of Gladsmuir, a couple of thousand Highland clansmen played havoc with some English regiments fresh back from the Flemish wars, and after the slaughter they took many prisoners, one of whom was David Gordon, great-grandfather of the hero and martyr of Khartoum.

From this it will be seen that, whether by design or accident, his branch of the ancient and widespread stock had managed to get upon the right side—that is to say, the side which was to fight for imperialism as distinguished from mere nationalism, which in many cases is only another way of spelling parochialism.

It is noteworthy, by the way, that Gordon’s grandfather, William Augustus, so named after “Butcher Cumberland,” fought at Louisburg and on the Heights of Abraham, after Captain Cook had taken those soundings on the St. Lawrence. His son, William Henry, fought as an officer of artillery at Maida, and it was his grandson who won the yellow jacket and mandarin’s button in suppressing the Taiping rebellion, who refused a roomful of gold as a bribe, and who, after carefully scratching out the inscription, gave the huge gold medal which he had received from the Emperor of China anonymously to the Coventry Relief Fund.

This “give away your medal,” to use his own words, is the keynote of his whole life. Gordon worked “for honour, not honours,” and that one letter makes a great deal of difference. We see here, too, the sign of his kinship with other Empire-Makers, the faculty of seeing what work had to be done and the power of doing it for its own sake, whatever difficulties there might lie in the way.