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The garrison of Khartoum had inflicted several severe defeats upon the Mahdi, but had also suffered some reverses. This, however, was only to be expected, when the troops under him were scarcely more disciplined than those of the Dervishes, who had always been greatly superior in numbers, and inspired with a fanatical belief in their prophet.
Gladstone is gone, to that solitary and pathetic figure who, for sixty years, shared all the sorrows and all the joys of Mr. Gladstone's life; who received his every confidence and every aspiration; who shared his triumphs with and cheered him under his defeats; who, by her tender vigilance, I firmly believe, sustained and prolonged his years.
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination.
In Margiana he founded another Alexandria. Alexander marches through, Affghanistan to the Punjaub. He defeats Porus. His troops refuse to march towards the Ganges, and he commences the descent of the Indus. He directs his admiral, Nearchus, to sail round from the Indus to the Persian Gulf; and leads the army back across Scinde and Beloochistan. Alexander returns to Babylon.
His fighting spirit did not fail him; he had not the least inclination to settle back for the buffets of fate; but the combat henceforth would be for honor only, not victory. He felt that his defeats had established themselves in an endless ratio to his efforts. "I shall go to work again, and save up money for a new mill.
Washburne, the American minister, the only foreign ambassador who remained in Paris during the siege, had accepted the charge of these unhappy Germans, and heart-breaking scenes took place daily at the American Legation. Soon after the defeats in the first week in August, Mr. Washburne had his last interview with the Empress Eugénie.
But he, who had worked for Mazzini, who had seen his hero achieve that greatest of all defeats, victory, he knew. He knew what would come of it, even if it came. He understood the fate of Christ and of all idealists, doomed to see themselves worshipped and their ideas rejected in a religion or a State founded like a national monument to perpetuate their defeat.
And finally, I am convinced that Europe to-day would not be materially different, even if all the decisive victories of her people could be changed into defeats, and their defeats into victories.
The national consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering, its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering.
The civil wars were mainly popular insurrections, being marked by neither cruelty nor fanaticism; indeed, they were the uprising of the people against oppression and misrule. The iron heel which had for so many years crushed the aspirations of the citizens of Venice, of Milan, and Rome, was finally removed only by the successive defeats of Austrian armies by Prussia and France.
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