THE scheme for the erection of a hospital at Port Said as a National Memorial to General Gordon has been given up by the committee. It has been found impracticable for a variety of reasons, almost any one of which would have been fatal to it. The reports upon it, which were read before the committee at their meeting at Marlborough House on Saturday, put the matter beyond all doubt. The site offered by the Suez Canal Company, and provisionally accepted by the committee, has been pronounced 'in every way unfit. The objections to it are so many, so grave, and so obvious, that it would seem, indeed, that it must have been selected with no small care as about the worst site possible for a hospital or for any other building. It is too small in extent, and is so shut in on all sides by roads and buildings as not to admit of being enlarged. The air and water supply are as bad as they well could be. In place of the wholesome breezes from the sea which the committee had been promised, the reports speak of pestilent and sickening emanations from Lake Mensal as the stuff with which the air will be charged. The ground in the immediate neighbourhood is foul to a degree which must be seen in order to be believed. The water comes from reservoirs supplied direct from the Sweet "Water Canal, falsely so called, and unaltered in compliance with the religious scruples of the Mahomedans, which forbid them to use water in any but its natural state. The reports add that the site is not easily accessible from the Canal; that a hospital erected upon it would not stand out conspicuously from any point of view; that the near neighbourhood of the Arab quarter is undesirable in itself and would cause danger to the hospital in the event of fire; and that the only alternative site anywhere near Port Said is not so favourable as to commend itself unreservedly for choice. In view of these statements, the committee have had no option. They have frankly acknowledged the mistake into which they had been led, and have resolved unanimously that it is undesirable to proceed any further with the erection of a hospital at Port Said as a national memorial to General Gordon.
The committee, we need hardly say, are not content with this merely negative result. They have abandoned the idea of the hospital at Port Said, and they do not yet know what new schema they are to substitute for it. But a memorial of some kind, worthy of the nation and of the man, they are as determined as ever to have. All that they propose for the present is to invent suggestions as to the manner in which the Gordon Fund is to be applied, and we have no doubt that Cardinal Manning is right in expecting that they will receive them in abundance. At their next meeting we shall probably learn the decision to which they have come and the reasons which have guided them to it.
Times, June 1, 1885
Two Per Cent
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
