The impulse of conquest which hurried the French and English to Canada and the Indies, which sent the Dutch to the Cape and the Spaniards to Peru, spread to Africa and led the Egyptians to the Soudan.  In the year 1819 Mohammed Ali, availing himself of the disorders alike as an excuse and an opportunity, sent his son Ismail up the Nile with a great army.  The Arab tribes, torn by dissension, exhausted by thirty years of general war, and no longer inspired by their neglected religion, offered a weak resistance.  Their slaves, having known the worst of life, were apathetic.  The black aboriginals were silent and afraid.  The whole vast territory was conquered with very little fighting, and the victorious army, leaving garrisons, returned in triumph to the Delta.

What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations?  To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain—­what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort?  The act is virtuous, the exercise invigorating, and the result often extremely profitable.  Yet as the mind turns from the wonderful cloudland of aspiration to the ugly scaffolding of attempt and achievement, a succession of opposite ideas arises.  Industrious races are displayed stinted and starved for the sake of an expensive Imperialism which they can only enjoy if they are well fed.  Wild peoples, ignorant of their barbarism, callous of suffering, careless of life but tenacious of liberty, are seen to resist with fury the philanthropic invaders, and to perish in thousands before they are convinced of their mistake.  The inevitable gap between conquest and dominion becomes filled with the figures of the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier, and the lying speculator, who disquiet the minds of the conquered and excite the sordid appetites of the conquerors.  And as the eye of thought rests on these sinister features, it hardly seems possible for us to believe that any fair prospect is approached by so foul a path.

From 1819 to 1883 Egypt ruled the Soudan.  Her rule was not kindly, wise, or profitable.  Its aim was to exploit, not to improve the local population.  The miseries of the people were aggravated rather than lessened:  but they were concealed.  For the rough injustice of the sword there were substituted the intricacies of corruption and bribery.  Violence and plunder were more hideous, since they were cloaked with legality and armed with authority.  The land was undeveloped and poor.  It barely sustained its inhabitants.  The additional burden of a considerable foreign garrison and a crowd of rapacious officials