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
in the entire history of the Sudan.
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