The Sudan is peculiarly interesting because it affords the best possible example of the wisdom—­and when I say that I speak with historical accuracy—­of disregarding the well-meaning but unwise sentimentalists who object to the spread of civilization at the expense of savagery.  I remember a quarter of a century ago when you were engaged in the occupation of the Sudan that many of your people at home and some of ours in America said that what was demanded in the Sudan was the application of the principles of independence and self-government to the Sudanese, coupled with insistence upon complete religious toleration and the abolition of the slave trade.  Unfortunately, the chief reason why the Mahdists wanted independence and self-government was that they could put down all religions but their own and carry on the slave trade.  I do not believe that in the whole world there is to be found any nook of territory which has shown such astonishing progress from the most hideous misery to well-being and prosperity as the Sudan has shown during the last twelve years while it has been under British rule.  Up to that time it was independent, and it governed itself; and independence and self-government in the hands of the Sudanese proved to be much what independence and self-government would have been in a wolf pack.  Great crimes were committed there, crimes so dark that their very hideousness protects them from exposure.  During a decade and a half, while Mahdism controlled the country, there flourished a tyranny which for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even imagine.  The keystones of the Mahdist party were religious intolerance and slavery, with murder and the most abominable cruelty as the method of obtaining each.

During those fifteen years at least two-thirds of the population, probably seven or eight millions of people, died by violence or by starvation.  Then the English came in; put an end to the independence and self-government which had wrought this hideous evil; restored order, kept the peace, and gave to each individual a liberty which, during the evil days of their own self-government, not one human being possessed, save only the blood-stained tyrant who at the moment was ruler.  I stopped at village after village in the Sudan, and in many of them I was struck by the fact that, while there were plenty of children, they were all under twelve years old; and inquiry always developed that these children were known as “Government children,” because in the days of Mahdism it was the literal truth that in a very large proportion of the communities every child was either killed or died of starvation and hardship, whereas under the peace brought by English rule families are flourishing, men and women are no longer hunted to death, and the children are brought up under more favorable circumstances, for soul and body, than have ever previously obtained