and alarming, it is much more so because all that can be said in his behalf has already been said by more eloquent tongues than mine.  I have little hope that I can add anything to the picture that has been already drawn [allusion to previous speeches made by the Earl of Cambridge, Lord Lansdowne, and Lord Rosebery], but no one can wonder at the vast enthusiasm by which the career of this great soldier has been received in this city.  It is not merely his own personal qualities that have achieved it.  It is also the strange dramatic interest of the circumstances, and the conditions under which his laurels have been won. [Cheers.]

It has been a long campaign, the first part of which we do not look back to with so much pleasure because we had undertaken a fearful task without a full knowledge of the conditions we had to satisfy or the real character of the foes to whom we were opposed. ["Hear!  Hear!”] The remembrance of that heroic figure whose virtues and whose death are impressed so deeply upon the memory of the whole of the present generation of Englishmen, the vicissitudes of those anxious campaigns in which the most splendid deeds of gallantry were achieved are yet fresh in the minds of the English people and Lord Rosebery has not exaggerated when he has said that the debt was felt deeply in the mind of every Englishman, however little they might talk of it at the time and when the opportunity arrived with what eagerness, in spite of any possible discouragement—­with what eagerness the opportunity was seized. [Cheers.] It was a campaign—­the campaign which your gallant guest has won—­it was a campaign marked by circumstances which have seldom marked a campaign in the history of the world. [Cheers.] I suppose that wonderful combination of all achievements and discoveries of modern science, in support of the gallantry and well-tried strategy of a British leader—­I suppose these things have not been seen in our history before. [Cheers.] But the note of this campaign was that the Sirdar not only won the battles which he was set to fight, but he furnished himself the instruments by which they were won, or rather, I should say, he was the last and perhaps by the nature of the circumstances the most efficient of a list of distinguished men whose task it has been to rescue the Egyptian army from inefficiency and contempt in order to put it on the pinnacle of glory it occupies now. [Cheers.]

I remember in our debates during that terrible campaign of 1884-85 a distinguished member of the Government of that day observing with respect to Egyptian troops that they were splendid soldiers if only they would not run away. [Laughter.]