All great movements, every vigorous impulse that a community may feel, become perverted and distorted as time passes, and the atmosphere of the earth seems fatal to the noble aspirations of its peoples.  A wide humanitarian sympathy in a nation easily degenerates into hysteria.  A military spirit tends towards brutality.  Liberty leads to licence, restraint to tyranny.  The pride of race is distended to blustering arrogance.  The fear of God produces bigotry and superstition.  There appears no exception to the mournful rule, and the best efforts of men, however glorious their early results, have dismal endings, like plants which shoot and bud and put forth beautiful flowers, and then grow rank and coarse and are withered by the winter.  It is only when we reflect that the decay gives birth to fresh life, and that new enthusiasms spring up to take the places of those that die, as the acorn is nourished by the dead leaves of the oak, the hope strengthens that the rise and fall of men and their movements are only the changing foliage of the ever-growing tree of life, while underneath a greater evolution goes on continually.

The movement which Mohammed Ahmed created did not escape the common fate of human enterprise; nor was it long before the warm generous blood of a patriotic and religious revolt congealed into the dark clot of a military empire.  With the expulsion or destruction of the foreign officials, soldiers, and traders, the racial element began to subside.  The reason for its existence was removed.  With the increasing disorders the social agitation dwindled; for communism pre-supposes wealth, and the wealth of the Soudan was greatly diminished.  There remained only the fanatical fury which the belief in the divine mission of the Mahdi had excited; and as the necessity for a leader passed away, the belief in his sanctity grew weaker.  But meanwhile a new force was making itself felt on the character of the revolt.  The triumph no less than the plunder which had rewarded the Mahdi’s victories had called into existence a military spirit distinct from the warlike passions of the tribesmen—­the spirit of the professional soldier.

The siege of Khartoum was carried on while this new influence was taking the place of the original forces of revolt.  There was a period when a neutral point was obtained and the Mahdist power languished.  But the invasion of the Eastern Soudan by the British troops in the spring and the necessary advance of the relieving columns in the winter of 1884 revived the patriotic element.  The tribes who had made a great effort to free themselves from foreign domination saw in the operations of Sir Gerald Graham and Lord Wolseley an attempt to bring them again under the yoke.  The impulse which was given to the Mahdi’s cause was sufficient to raise a fierce opposition to the invading forces.  The delay in the despatch of the relief expedition had sealed the fate of Khartoum, and the fall of the town established the supremacy of the military spirit on which the Dervish Empire was afterwards founded.