THE work done on Saturday by the General Committee of the Lord Mayor's Fund for providing a memorial to the hero of Khartoum was of a purely destructive character. A resolution was passed condemning the scheme to which it had already given a qualified approval of establishing a hospital at Port Said. The grounds for arriving at this decision were set forth in a number of reports which have been recently made to the Committee, the substance of which was to the effect that the site offered by the Suez Canal Company was totally unsuitable for a hospital. The objections were various and incontrovertible. The first condition of a site for a hospital is that it should be healthy, whereas that on which it was intended to build the Gordon Hospital is extremely pestilential. This is due to its proximity to the foreshore of Lake Mensal and to the general insanitary condition of the soil, owing to the number of cesspools with no possibility of relief by any system of drainage, whilst the uncertain nature of the water supply and its indifferent quality would deprive the institution of one of its primary necessaries as a sanatorium, Upon these grounds the Committee made a report that they were unable to recommend the construction of a Memorial Hospital on the site proposed or on any other site in the proximity of Port Said, and this report was adopted on Saturday without a dissentient voice. The universal feeling will be one of satisfaction that a very grave -- indeed a fatal -- error has been so happily avoided. When the scheme of expending the Gordon's Memorial Fund on the construction of a hospital at Port Said was broached, there was so much apparently to recommend it that some excuse may be found for the readiness with which the Committee entertained it. Such an institution was undoubtedly wanted, and by its international character it would have fittingly typified the universal philanthropy of the man to whose memory it would have been raised. But it is now evident that anywhere in the neighbourhood of Port Said a great hospital is an impossibility. "We have said that the work done by the Committee on Saturday has been exclusively destructive, because whilst definitively abandoning the former scheme they were unable to suggest any other in its stead. The outcome of these deliberations was embodied in a resolution moved by Cardinal Manning, to the effect that the members of the Committee be invited to submit in writing any suggestions they are desirous of malting for the appropriation of the fund, and that the sub-committee report on these suggestions at the next meeting of the General Committee. The question of the best way of raising a fitting memorial to General Gordon is, therefore, still open, and the form it will assume is still a matter of speculation. A proposal was made a short time since which has certainly much to recommend it. It was to create a camp or barracks in which boys should be educated and trained for the military service, or should they prove unsuitable for that, then fop some other useful avocation in life. The present fund amounts to upwards of £16,000, and we believe that two ladies who made this suggestion offered to subscribe each £1,000 if it were adopted. We have no doubt, however, that in accordance with the resolution passed by the Committee a considerable number of valuable proposals will be made, but we would venture to suggest that before the Committee meet to decide upon their respective merits they should be submitted to the criticism of the public.
Morning Post, June 1, 1885
The Gordon Memorial
The Gordon Memorial
Table of Contents
Miracles of healing - Christian Miracles or Healing
History of Russia: Christian Versus Barbarian
History of Japan: Early Christian Martyrs
The Jesus of History
The Assyrian Origin of Devil Worshippers
The Christ Of Dogma
The early history of Constantinople
